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AI-generated visuals of car-free US cities help improve support for sustainable policies

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 399–403 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Americans are often reluctant to support policies that aim to meaningfully change transportation. Here we show how new techniques from artificial intelligence can be harnessed to increase public support for green policies. We use text-to-image generative AI models to create re-imagined, car-free versions of various streets in America and find that across two large-scale survey studies (N = 3,129), viewing these re-imaginations significantly increases support for a hypothetical sustainable transport bill.

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Fig. 1: Life with and without sustainable transportation.
Fig. 2: Results.

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Data availability

Anonymized participant data for all our experiments are available at https://github.com/rachit-dubey/car-free-america.

Code availability

The code to run the analyses and reproduce the figures is available on GitHub at https://github.com/rachit-dubey/car-free-america.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Kreiss, D. Yu, L. Globig and J. Peterson for valuable comments and feedback, and Z. Katz (Better Streets AI) for providing the prompts to generate car-free versions of American streets using Dall-E 2. Special thanks to Rethink35 team for providing valuable feedback and inputs on the images we generated using Stable Diffusion. This work was supported by funds from the NOMIS foundation.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors jointly supervised this work: Thomas L. Griffiths and Rahul Bhui.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sloan School of Management, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Rachit Dubey & Rahul Bhui

  2. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Mathew D. Hardy & Thomas L. Griffiths

  3. Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Thomas L. Griffiths

  4. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Rahul Bhui

Authors
  1. Rachit Dubey
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  2. Mathew D. Hardy
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  3. Thomas L. Griffiths
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  4. Rahul Bhui
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Contributions

R.D. and M.D.H. developed the study concept. R.D. wrote the software, conducted experiments and analysed the data. T.L.G. and R.B. supervised the study design and data analysis. All authors discussed the results. R.D. drafted the paper, and M.D.H., T.L.G. and R.B. provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the paper for submission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rachit Dubey.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Maria Luce Lupetti, Tamara Metze and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–3, Results for Study 1 and Results for Study 2.

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Dubey, R., Hardy, M.D., Griffiths, T.L. et al. AI-generated visuals of car-free US cities help improve support for sustainable policies. Nat Sustain 7, 399–403 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01299-6

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