Climate Change Short Story (AI Assisted?)

The goal of this assignment, and one of the key goals of the course, is to draw on the science of climate change to imagine what the future might be like as temperatures continue to rise due to human greenhouse gas emissions, positive feedback loops, and tipping points.

For this assignment you will be helping me develop in greater depth the website AICliFi.com that my students and I created 2 years ago when AI was first becoming available.

AiCliFi.com is a public resource for Cli-Fi stories that help us imagine climate futures, and this semester we will also think critically about AI and climate change.

First carefully read Our Final Warning by Mark Lynas. Identify conditions Lynas describes in the future where you would like to set a short story or stories. You can create short stories at different global temperatures, or create them all at the same temperature but have the characters, setting, and action differ substantially.

An essential component of the assignment is that you carefully select from the relevant chapter(s) in Lynas' book specific climate impacts that you want included and explored to frame the social issues your story will explore.

Next, the idea is to experiment with ChatGPT, and/or another generative AI program that will write stories. By varying your prompts and interacting with the program you want to develop 4 short stories that you find potentially interesting.

At this point, let me be clear that I share with many of you reservations about AI and its environmental impacts. When talking about AI impacts a distinction can be made between individual use and the scale, infrastructure, and institutional use of AI, that is the way corporations and governments structure AI with or without environmental limits, renewable energy, transparency, or justice.

According to ChatGPT, working with AI to develop a short story will probably release between 0.5-5 grams of CO2 equivalent (depends on AI data center energy source, fossil fuel or renewable). Compare this to sending a plain text email, 0.3-4 CO2e, streaming video 50-100 grams CO2e/hour, or to an average gas-powered car 400 grams CO2e per mile.

This assignment does not require you to use AI - you are free to write without it. It does require you to analyze how, if, and why or why not you use it. You may want to start with a draft of your own that you further develop with AI. Or significantly change an AI draft as a stage in the writing process.   

If you are going to use AI, ChatGPT gave me these suggestions for different AI programs you might use:

1. GPT-5.5 / GPT-6 (OpenAI models) Excellent at long-form narrative, world-building, and character arcs. Can generate multi-scene structures, thematic motifs, and sustained voice Good at integrating technical, ethical, and speculative elements. Best for: Generating drafts, alternate endings, thematic scaffolds.

2. Claude 3 / Claude 3.5 (Anthropic) Strong at maintaining tone and philosophical depth Better at constraint-based tasks (e.g., sociological realism plus speculative elements). Less inclined to fabricate unrealistic science. Best for: Reflective cli-fi with nuance, social justice emphasis.

3. Gemini Advanced (Google) Strong multimodal reasoning; good if students incorporate images, maps, or speculative diagrams Useful for worldbuilding that spans sensory detail. Best for: Combining narrative + visual imagination. 

4. NovelAI / Story-focused Creative Models Dedicated to fiction with persistent character/world memory Good for interactive iterative writing (students "co-create" over many turns). Best for: Serial story development. 

You might experiment with point of view, first person, third person, omniscient narrator, multiple narrators, etc. Are the characters, plot, and setting interesting? Is there conflict and emotional complexity? Dialogue is a dimension of many (not all) stories - can you work with ChatGPT (or other AI text generator) to use dialogue or interior monologue to give insight into characters, create suspense, convey action, etc? Do you want to experiment with different global settings and touches that create a local feel?

Does the story capture and reveal dimensions of how human society and perhaps the natural environment will be impacted by global heating? Are there issues of inequality, politics, corporate power, marginalized perspectives, and/or climate justice? Are there certain elements of that impact that you want to see if you can get ChatGPT to include?

Next, further develop your favorite story. By targeting your prompts around first and later drafts you can get your story to more closely connect with the science, become longer and more complex, explore specific aspects, reach different conclusions, integrate new technologies, more or less realistic, even create multiple "choose your own adventure" ending.

At this stage you may want, but are not required, to take what ChatGPT produces and work it over yourself.  In your own word processor make changes that improve the story and create the final product you are after.

Your best story is going to be included on the AICliFi.com website. Go to an AI program that generates images and create and image that could go along with your story. You might look at Canva, Creator.nightcafe.studio, Craiyon, Dall-E, AI Art Generator, Dezgop, or other AI image programs. Experiment until you have an image you like and that fits the story.

Finally, write a couple of pages of analysis of the stories you generated. How did they differ? Why did you like some better than others? What did you learn about writing with AI? Write about working with AI, and also write about what experimenting with short stories using AI helped you learn beyond the basic science about possible climate futures that might actually happen, depending on human action to expand, continue, reduce, or end greenhouse gas emissions?

Email to me, in one or two Word document(s):

A) Your favorite short story (or stories) that you want published on the site. Each story to be published needs to have: 

1) The degree of warming that the story is set at; 

2) The image that goes with the story; 

3) A title; 

4) A one sentence description of the content of the story that can be used on the index page to let readers know what your story is about and interest them in reading it - make the story sound appealing;

5) The story itself; and,

6) A short 2-4 sentence description of how you worked with AI (or not) prompts and/or suggestions. (This last description will be published at the end of your story.)

B) Your analysis of the stories, process, and what you learned about AI and about the possible climate futures as described above (at least 1-2 pages).

C) Lastly, the other 4 stories you generated. Give them titles too so I can tell them apart.

Created by: allen.webb@wmich.edu
Revised Date: 1/26