<
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/10/23/anti-renewables-group-uses-ai-in-government-inquiry-submissions/>
"Rainforest Reserves Australia is an odd little environmental charity in
Queensland in Australia. It started out running a cassowary sanctuary.
But lately, RRA’s gone big into anti-renewable energy activism. Their line is
that renewable energy — wind and solar — is horrifyingly destructive to the
environment. This is completely false, by the way.
Looking at their public filings, RRA are not getting big money from anyone! But
it so happens that their talking points are popular with proponents of fossil
fuel talking points.
The National Party in Australia, which happens to love coal, loves the RRA and
quotes them a lot. There’s a bizarrely wrong RRA map, alleging that renewables
will use huge amounts of farmland, that the Nationals and the Murdoch press
have been pushing hard of late.
RRA makes a lot of submissions to government inquiries. And a number of these
turn out to have made-up references. Just like someone wrote them with a
chatbot:
The organisation’s submission writer has admitted using AI to help write
more than 100 submissions to councils and state and federal governments
since August 2024, and to also using AI to answer questions from the
Guardian.
The
Guardian checked with two of the academics that RRA cited in its latest
Senate submission. Naomi Oreskes, author of “Merchants of Doubt” — a book that
covers climate change denial — says “the passage cites my work in a way that is
100% misleading.”
Robert Brulle of Brown University also writes about climate change deniers. He
says:
The citations are totally misleading. I have never written on these topics
in any of my papers. To say that these citations support their argument is
absurd.
RRA made previous submissions to inquiries on “forever chemicals” — allegedly a
significant hazard of solar panels, and that’s another fossil fuel talking
point — that cited papers from the
Journal of Cleaner Production. The journal
exists — but the cited papers did not exist. Elsevier, the publisher, said the
titles were likely AI hallucinations.
The main author of RRA’s submissions is a volunteer, Dr. Anne S. Smith. She
told the
Guardian that Elsevier had removed the papers because “they contain
findings that challenge dominant policy narratives”. Yes, that must be it — not
using an AI that may have hallucinated paper titles."
Yet another example of someone - with a Doctorate! - who may be
well-intentioned but seems to be unable to grasp that current LLMs are designed
to encourage cognitive bias. If you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, they’ll
give you more reasons not to let it go.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
