Sola Kim

Project focus: The Fellow will engage in research addressing the social implications of artificial intelligence and AI governance.  

Sola Kim is a sustainability scientist who investigates whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can address the environmental justice needs of the environments they are introduced to. With expertise in social-ecological systems, she asks a question about human-nature interactions and infrastructure: when multiple pressures affect a community simultaneously, what fails? Her dissertation research empirically tested this question. In one study, she discovered that when federal agencies use large language models to summarize public comments on environmental rulemaking, the factor causing consistent differential treatment was occupation—comments from lower-status jobs were summarized less accurately and more simply. In another study, she demonstrated that language models reduce the diversity of American climate opinions in ways that standard audits are unlikely to detect. Her ongoing work, supported by the Climate Social Science Network at Brown University, tracks federal guidance on model content as it moves through commercial systems and reaches the public. She holds a Ph.D. in sustainability from Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability.