We are in the era of generative AI, with large language models (LLMs) achieving outstanding results in various tasks. This new technology is here to stay and is already being embedded in our day-to-day lives. However, "with great power comes great responsibility" and researchers have the duty to shed light on all the aspects of genAI. In this talk I will briefly show how LLMs are built and delve into their "good" and "bad" capabilities. I will showcase some of our work leveraging LLMs for multilingual transfer (the "good"), whilst also presenting our work on LLM-generated disinformation (the "bad").

Climate disinformation erodes public trust in climate science, undermines urgency around extreme weather events, and fuels polarization at exactly the moments when clear information matters most. This is especially relevant here in Rio Grande do Sul, which has faced severe flooding events since 2023–2024 and again in 2026: whenever an extreme weather event unfolds, social media floods with disinformation in near real time, right when accurate information matters most. Yet climate disinformation occupies a distinct space within the broader disinformation landscape: it combines scientific complexity, seasonality, and heavy political charge, and rarely receives dedicated attention at AI-and-disinformation events, which tend to focus on politics or public health. This talk explores how AI — paired with an unlikely ally, football — can help address that gap with ClimaVAR, an AI-based tool built around a simple metaphor: football's VAR (Video Assistant Referee). ClimaVAR combines existing building blocks (classifiers, RAG, and LLMs) into a system accessible enough to be adopted by two real-world communication campaigns during the World Cup 2026. Drawing on this experience, I present what made the approach work in practice, and how it could extend beyond football and climate to other sports and other domains of technical-scientific disinformation.

In the past and present decades, politics have gotten further alienated from people: The positions of the wealthiest influence political positions more than popular opinion (Gilens and Page, 2014), corporations are now classified as people, and money constitutes speech (Citizens United v. FEC). At the same time, there is a right-ward and fascist political shift across the globe, with people like Espriella elected in Colombia, Trump in the United States, Modi in India, and a surge in far-right political parties in Europe, such as Reform in the United Kingdom, Danish People's Party and Denmark Democrats in Denmark, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and Front Nationale in France. This political shift is accompanied by an increasingly authoritarian shift in the corporate world: the eight most valuable companies on the NASDAQ account for roughly a third of the value of the stock exchange, and unequal wealth distribution between individuals is continually getting worse — the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. At the same time, advanced technologies for surveillance are being embedded widely into tools by the very companies that are engaging in efforts to bend regulation to their will. In this talk, we will discuss what the current trend of AI research is, what political developments accompany it, and where we are left as people. I argue that we as scientists are derelict in our duties to inform and educate the public — not out of negligence towards the public but a lack of awareness of the impact of the work that we have conducted. I call instead for slow and deliberate work towards social and technological futures that support democratic realities and sovereign people.