This Montreal-made website uses AI to show the potential impact of climate change on any address
CBC
Have you ever wondered what your home could look like in a flood? How about your favourite restaurant blanketed in thick smog or Montreal's beloved Bell Centre backdropped by orange skies?
These sights can all be generated on a website launched Thursday that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate what almost any place on Earth would look like under different catastrophic scenarios caused by climate change.
The website, thisclimatedoesnotexist.com, applies realistic filters depicting flooding, wildfires or smog at any address available through Google Street View. It's intended to raise awareness in users about future scenarios if the world's response to climate change continues to fall short.
Yoshua Bengio, scientific director and founder of Montreal's AI institute Mila, which created the site, says the project is not a climate modelling projection. Rather, it's intended to boost people's empathy — and subsequently, their action — by making the impacts of climate change more personal to them.
"If I tell you about something really bad happening far from you and I tell it to you with graphs and equations... it doesn't touch you very much and it doesn't become a priority for you," he said.
The AI expert and professor at Université de Montréal says he came up with the concept for the site when he noticed society had all the tools to combat climate change, yet no one was acting.
"Most people understand that there is an issue, but they have more pressing things in their lives," he said.
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