SUJAWAL, Sindh: Holding a battery in one hand and an LED light in the other, Abdul Ghani waded through the salty waters of the Arabian Sea to reach his small wooden boat. 

It was just past sunset, the sky dimming fast, but Ghani had no fear as he had light.

Ghani is one of hundreds of Pakistani coastal residents who have benefited from a green energy initiative under the World Bank-backed Sindh Solar Energy Project (SSEP), a multi-component program that aims to bring sustainable power to over 1.2 million of the southern province’s poorest and most energy-deprived people.

While torches don’t offer adequate visibility in the vast seascape, and boat generators scare fish away when powered on, the battery-powered LED lights from the home energy system have proven to be an unexpected boon for nighttime fishing for residents like Ghani. 

“Earlier, I couldn’t catch any fish, but now when I go fishing using these lights, by the grace of God, I catch good fish,” the 45-year-old fisherman from Karo Chan, a coastal village in Sujawal district located in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, told Arab News. 

“This helps me support my children and manage our livelihood.”

The project targets people either without any electricity or facing power cuts, identified through Pakistan’s national poverty scorecard, a data-driven assessment tool used to identify and prioritize assistance for low-income households.

“Each family has a solar system with fans, three LED light bulbs, mobile charging facility, along with a charge controller and a battery package,” Mehfooz Ahmed Qazi, the project director, told Arab News. 

“All these cost Rs6,000 ($21), ten percent of the actual price, to instill a sense of ownership in the users.”

Qazi said the project, launched in October 2019 and set to be completed in July 2025, had four components: a 400-megawatt solar power initiative for grid integration, rooftop solar systems for public sector buildings including 34 district headquarter hospitals, off-grid solar home systems for poor households and the establishment of solar equipment standardization laboratories at NED University in Karachi and Mehran University in Jamshoro.

The key objective of the project is to promote the potential of green energy across the province. 

Out of the 400 megawatts planned for grid integration, 270 megawatts will be added to the system of K-Electric — serving over 3.4 million customers in Karachi and surrounding areas in Sindh and Balochistan — not only increasing the share of green power but also helping reduce electricity tariffs for residents of Karachi.

By the end of the project, 34 megawatts of rooftop solar installations will be set up on buildings across the province, while 200,000 solar home systems will be distributed, benefiting 1.2 million families. 

Of these, 50,000 families in five coastal districts, including Sujawal, will receive solar home systems under the third component of the project that started in February this year.

For families like Ghani’s, the change has been immediate and life changing.

“I turn on three lights,” he explained. “When we turn on the lights, small fish come. Seeing the small fish, the big ones also come. Where I place my net, both big and small fish come into it.”

Ghani also uses the system at home once he returns from the sea.

His wife, Kulsoom, said life, was once defined by heat, insects and fear of the dark, had now changed. 

“Previously, there used to be complete darkness,” she said. “The children would be distressed. We didn’t even have a fan. It used to be extremely hot, and we would suffer.”

Like many women in rural Sindh, Kulsoom’s day revolves around managing the household and caring for her children. Now, her nights are more peaceful.

“Now that we have solar [system], we are very happy, and the children sleep peacefully,” she said.

“COMPLETE DARKNESS“

In village Qaboolpur in the nearby Tando Muhammad Khan district, Naeema Gul, 47, had similar story. 

Her husband, Gul Bahar, is deaf and mute. They have six children, one of whom has polio.

“We didn’t have electricity,” Gul said. “We used hand fans. It would get extremely hot, and there were always mosquitoes … Now, thank God, we have received solar energy. Earlier, our home used to be in complete darkness. Now we have light.”

Gul uses the fan provided with the solar system during peak summer heat, and the LED lights allow her to do embroidery on traditional ralli quilts, colorful patchwork textiles made by rural women in the province. She also uses the light to recite the Holy Qur’an at night.

Her disabled son, Gulzar, a fifth grader, has also resumed his studies.

“After receiving the solar panel, I can study and write with ease,” he said.

For women like Changi Rind, a widow with 10 children and dozens of grandchildren living in remote Jan Muhammad Jatt village of Sujawal, the biggest relief has been security.

“Previously, thieves used to come, but now, because of the light, they stay away,” she said. “At night, one person had to stay awake. There was no light in the wilderness, only darkness.”

Back in Karo Chan, as night fell, Ghani’s returned on his boat with a modest catch, unpacked the system and handed it over to Kulsoom.

With a fan whirring in the corner and her children sitting under LED lights, she reflected on how far the community had come:

“Where there was once darkness, solar [system] has brought light to our home and our lives as well.”

WASHINGTON, US: As misinformation exploded during India’s four-day conflict with Pakistan, social media users turned to an AI chatbot for verification — only to encounter more falsehoods, underscoring its unreliability as a fact-checking tool.

With tech platforms reducing human fact-checkers, users are increasingly relying on AI-powered chatbots — including xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini — in search of reliable information.

“Hey @Grok, is this true?” has become a common query on Elon Musk’s platform X, where the AI assistant is built in, reflecting the growing trend of seeking instant debunks on social media.

But the responses are often themselves riddled with misinformation.

Grok — now under renewed scrutiny for inserting “white genocide,” a far-right conspiracy theory, into unrelated queries — wrongly identified old video footage from Sudan’s Khartoum airport as a missile strike on Pakistan’s Nur Khan air base during the country’s recent conflict with India.

Unrelated footage of a building on fire in Nepal was misidentified as “likely” showing Pakistan’s military response to Indian strikes.

“The growing reliance on Grok as a fact-checker comes as X and other major tech companies have scaled back investments in human fact-checkers,” McKenzie Sadeghi, a researcher with the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard, told AFP.

“Our research has repeatedly found that AI chatbots are not reliable sources for news and information, particularly when it comes to breaking news,” she warned.

NewsGuard’s research found that 10 leading chatbots were prone to repeating falsehoods, including Russian disinformation narratives and false or misleading claims related to the recent Australian election.

In a recent study of eight AI search tools, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that chatbots were “generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.”

When AFP fact-checkers in Uruguay asked Gemini about an AI-generated image of a woman, it not only confirmed its authenticity but fabricated details about her identity and where the image was likely taken.

Grok recently labeled a purported video of a giant anaconda swimming in the Amazon River as “genuine,” even citing credible-sounding scientific expeditions to support its false claim.

In reality, the video was AI-generated, AFP fact-checkers in Latin America reported, noting that many users cited Grok’s assessment as evidence the clip was real.

Such findings have raised concerns as surveys show that online users are increasingly shifting from traditional search engines to AI chatbots for information gathering and verification.

The shift also comes as Meta announced earlier this year it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States, turning over the task of debunking falsehoods to ordinary users under a model known as “Community Notes,” popularized by X.

Researchers have repeatedly questioned the effectiveness of “Community Notes” in combating falsehoods.

Human fact-checking has long been a flashpoint in a hyperpolarized political climate, particularly in the United States, where conservative advocates maintain it suppresses free speech and censors right-wing content — something professional fact-checkers vehemently reject.

AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking program, including in Asia, Latin America, and the European Union.

The quality and accuracy of AI chatbots can vary, depending on how they are trained and programmed, prompting concerns that their output may be subject to political influence or control.

Musk’s xAI recently blamed an “unauthorized modification” for causing Grok to generate unsolicited posts referencing “white genocide” in South Africa.

When AI expert David Caswell asked Grok who might have modified its system prompt, the chatbot named Musk as the “most likely” culprit.

Musk, the South African-born billionaire backer of President Donald Trump, has previously peddled the unfounded claim that South Africa’s leaders were “openly pushing for genocide” of white people.

“We have seen the way AI assistants can either fabricate results or give biased answers after human coders specifically change their instructions,” Angie Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, told AFP.

“I am especially concerned about the way Grok has mishandled requests concerning very sensitive matters after receiving instructions to provide pre-authorized answers.”