“Tell them the story. They need the truth. If you don't tell them the real story, it all falls flat.”

That's what the ghost of an old woman says to nun-turned-astrophysicist Mary Malone in The Amber Telescope, the final book in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy and one of my favorite novels. The warning came to mind while touring a rare art exhibit at the University of Southern California's Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island, 24 miles off the Southern California coast.

The 11-image series depicts a sustainable future for Los Angeles as imagined by artificial intelligence.

One image depicts a downtown streetscape shaded by an elevated walkway overgrown with plants; another adds solar panels to the hillside below the Hollywood sign. Several images contemplate a vibrant future for the LA River, removing concrete flood barriers from the riverbank and restoring the waterway to abundant vegetation, wildlife and walking paths.

One particularly striking photo shows bicycles replacing cars on a riverside highway.

Are any of these visions realistic? Does it matter if they become “true”?

And how should we feel about the fact that a mysterious computer brain played a role in creating them?

I posed these questions to Allison Agsten, art curator at USC’s Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability. She also directs the Center for Climate Journalism and Communication at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and oversaw the development of the Sustainable LA exhibit. She herself has mixed feelings about artificial intelligence.

“This installation represents an experiment,” Agsten said.

And she's quick to admit that it hasn't always been smooth sailing.

Catalina Island has long been plagued by mule deer, a species of invasive deer introduced by humans for hunting in the 1930s that has destroyed natural habitat, increased fire danger and harmed native wildlife, according to the Catalina Island Conservancy.

But when USC Cinema Arts Professor Cathy Smith and three graduate students asked AI programs, including Midjourney and OpenAI's Dall-E, to imagine a sustainable Catalina Island, one of the programs produced an image of a “thriving deer herd,” Agsten recalled — apparently fooled by online discussion into thinking more deer was a good thing, not a bad thing.

“I said [to the students]”So let's talk about why that image doesn't work,” Agsten told me.

There were no invasive mule deer on display, nor were any of the digital fever dreams that ranged from one Agsten described as “dark and apocalyptic” to one he called “the most extreme dream” of a future Los Angeles.

I know enough about artificial intelligence to be worried, but not enough to know how worried I should be.

In the hands of Google and Meta, this technology threatens the news industry by distributing journalism created by humans like me for free (sometimes after altering it to the point of inaccuracy). The data centers that run AI consume vast amounts of energy and water. Worse, liars could use AI to create a distorted picture of reality for nefarious purposes, like making people believe a national park has been closed. Migrant tent camps overflow(it's not.)

So why turn to potentially dystopian technology to envision a better future? Why not let Smith and her students get creative?

Agsten had a practical answer: artificial intelligence can save a huge amount of time.

Instead of spending months discussing ideas, working out designs, and deciding which ones were worth developing further, Smith and his students could just feed a prompt into ChatGPT and have the machine spit out options instantly. They created and sifted through about 100 potential images, then used their initial AI creation to refine the instructions for the computer's brain.

The most time consuming part and the part that required the most creativity was coming up with the right prompts.

“In real life, I would never do that. I would never tell an artist what to create,” Agsten said.

The neural network came up with things humans couldn't think of—at least, not quickly. Some of it was nonsense, like invasive deer. But other fantasies were more interesting. Agsten particularly liked an AI-generated image of a cargo ship covered in lush trees and other vegetation, a rare update to Southern California's heavily polluted shipping industry.

“When you create something that goes against your expectations and beliefs, something different happens in your mind,” Agsten says. “I don't think the people typing up the prompts for this spaceship necessarily expected it to turn out like this.”

For me, looking at the AI-generated images was a strange and fascinating experience.

I'm far from an art critic, unless I consider Disneyland a work of art (which, let's be honest, I do).

But as I enjoyed the lovely summer breeze on Catalina Island and gazed upon the small mountain towering behind the artwork, I found myself thinking about my home city: what I love about Los Angeles and what could be better: the good weather, the great hiking, the amazing food and entertainment. The terrible traffic, the polluted air, the lack of parks in many neighborhoods.

The fantastical AI artwork did its job: it expanded my consciousness and made me rethink what kind of place LA is.

“When you walk into a museum gallery, you feel like you're in Kansas City. You feel like you're in Corsica. You feel like you're anywhere,” Agsten says. “I'm really interested to see how people experience it differently than if it were on the walls of USC's main campus.”

The whole Wrigley Marine Science Center felt like a completely different world from Exposition Park, home of USC.

I went there by boat, a diesel-fueled ship named Miss Christie that Wrigley officials are trying to raise funds to replace before it runs afoul of state pollution regulations. The island campus itself is being made more sustainable, with solar panels in the dining hall and plans for a solar-battery microgrid, a big deal for an island that's currently powered by electricity. Mainly diesel generators.

“At least 95 percent of our operations will be powered by the solar grid,” said Sean Conner, associate director of operations.

As Connor and his colleagues guided us around the campus, they related its history: Chewing-gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley Jr. bought most of Catalina Island for $2 million in 1916. Nearly half a century later, his son Philip, a conservationist who helped found the Catalina Island Conservancy, donated part of the land to the University of Southern California for the construction of a marine science station.

Located 11 miles in a crowed line from the island's capital, Avalon, the facility is where professors mentor students and conduct original research, with current focuses including protecting Catalina Island's foxes (cute creatures, despite the fact that one annoyed me the night it darted into our campsite outside Avalon) and capturing greenhouse gas emissions from cargo ships. Funding from the Ballmer GroupThe company was co-founded by former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.

Another interesting project involves mining sunflowers for nickel, a metal essential in the transition to clean energy.

The researchers plan to plant hundreds of sunflower varieties in soil containing the metal in the science center's greenhouses. They will measure how much nickel the sunflowers absorb as they grow and whether that affects the plants' ability to survive and grow.

Their goal is to Environmentally destructive mining practices At least in some areas, contaminated old mines that still contain metals could be replaced with less harmful techniques, like planting sunflowers. That could help clean up the old mines while also creating more sustainable sources of nickel, lithium and cobalt, key ingredients in the batteries that power electric cars and store solar energy at night, helping phase out global-warming fossil fuels.

This is still early stage research and doesn't eliminate the need for more destructive mining, but if it helps, why not do it?

“The big goal of this project is to take advantage of something that nature already does very well – naturally sequestering metals like nickel – and see if we can selectively breed them for that specific trait,” said Diane Kim, a senior scientist at Wrigley Research Center.

My wild suggestion? If the research is successful, USC should hire Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez as a spokesman. An All-Star and Home Run Derby champion, he's become something of a folk hero by scattering sunflower seeds whenever his teammates hit a home run. I can see the TV ad now: a joyous Teoscar tosses a seed in the dirt outside the dugout, the seed grows into a sunflower, a USC researcher harvests it for five cents, that five cents goes into EV batteries, and we live happily ever after…

Of course, it's not that easy. Nothing good is ever easy. But that's the purpose of dreaming, right? Dreams help us achieve great things.

I'm not sure how I feel about artworks made by artificial intelligence yet, but I'm open to the idea that this technology might help us fight climate change, as much as it scares me. I've read about AI being used to speed things up. Permit Approval For rooftop solar panels Lower costs The goal is to build large-scale solar power plants and detect wildfires before they get too big.

Smith, a professor of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California who helped create the Catalina Art Exhibition, said he understands the “fear factor” of AI. But he finds the technology a valuable visualization tool for artists and scientists alike. Ultimately, he said, it's about how humans handle artificial intelligence, a reminder that all technology can be used for great good or great evil.

“The more people who use it ethically, the better,” Smith said.

I don't necessarily agree with that view, but whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay.

So let's use it to tell stories. True stories, we need truth. But stories that need to happen.

I hope all goes well.

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