In 2025, people are finding all kinds of uses for artificial intelligence. Look no further than the world’s chief contributors to pollution, for whom the buzzy new tech offers bold new possibilities to spew corporate propaganda.
Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr is a petrochemical industry mouthpiece and former Trump advisor who’s now hard at work developing a large language model (LLM) program to censor tree-hugger “propaganda” from epidemiological research, according to the Guardian.
Cox — who once claimed there’s no connection between air pollution and respiratory problems — has a long history of collaboration with such model citizens as tobacco monopoly Philip Morris USA, the American Chemistry Council, and the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association. Cox’s relationship with the American Petroleum Institute, the Guardian notes, is so cozy that he’s even let the petrochemical lobbying group “edit” his research.
He began work on his LLM back in 2023, after a “long experimental chat” with ChatGPT, in which he argued about pollutants and asked it to generate sonnets about Abraham Lincoln and PM2.5, a type of toxic particulate matter. The latter query, the Guardian highlights, led the line “no nose can catch you, for you are so fine.”
Dissatisfied with the length of time it took him to convince the notoriously agreeable ChatGPT that PM2.5s don’t cause lung cancer — a career-long hobby horse of his — Cox turned to his buddies in the petrochemical industry to pitch an app that could be pre-trained to avoid such inconvenient facts. Or, as he put it, to do “critical thinking at scale.”
That app, of course, is one which will tell users what Cox and his friends of industry want them to hear. His painfully obvious track record, including studies like a chemical industry-sponsored report on the supposed safety of PFOAs, will no-doubt form the foundation of his LLM’s training.
Like greenwashing, the corporate practice of misrepresenting something as environmentally friendly, experts say Cox’s “AI-washing” is a perfidious form of mass-market propaganda, meant to distance seedy characters like himself from the stigma that “petrochemical lapdog” carries.
“Instead of having scientists-for-hire do that denial work, which advances their economic interests, the industry is funding efforts to outsource it to a machine in order to give it an image of unbiased neutrality,” Itai Vardi of the Energy and Policy Institute told the Guardian.
“AI language models are not programmed, but built and trained,” Vardi continued, “and when in the hands and funding of this industry, can be dangerous as they will further erode public trust and understanding of this crucial science.”
Cox’s insistence on AI-washing public health on behalf of his corporate masters is doubly ironic given AI’s substantial impact on the environment — especially through air pollution. Researchers have recently found links between the coal-powered generators used to power AI datacenters in the United States and a drastic uptick in premature cancer and asthma deaths.
If, or perhaps when, Cox’s big business bot comes online, it probably won’t make a big scene. Instead, it’ll likely seep in unnoticed, part of the unrelenting flood of new AI tools — and all the consequences that come with it.
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