AI Emergency Alerts Are Coming. Humans Might Not Be Ready

This story was produced by Grist and copublished with WIRED. It is part of Distorted, a Grist series exploring the spread of misinformation in the wake of extreme weather, and is published with support from the CO2 Foundation.

Earlier this month, after Hurricane Isaias made landfall on the Gulf Coast as a Category 3 hurricane, the emergency management expert Laura Myers got a call from a meteorologist in Alabama. Myers is director of the University of Alabama’s Center for Advanced Public Safety, and she talks to state and local emergency managers around her region all the time. The meteorologist told Myers that a local emergency manager had published a graphic showing where Isaias might threaten the Alabama coast with a “sting jet” of high winds.

The problem? The emergency manager had generated the graphic using an artificial intelligence chatbot, and it wasn’t accurate.

“That county emergency manager was trying to get his stakeholders to focus on the risk in that county, and so he had asked AI to help him,” she said. “It did what he wanted it to do, but it was not meteorologically accurate.”

Most emergency management agencies don’t permit employees to use generative AI, but Myers and most other emergency management experts agree that its usage is likely already pervasive at state and local disaster departments. There are hundreds of companies that are marketing AI tools to emergency managers for tasks like flood damage assessment and resource coordination, but public communication is one of the areas where government employees and startups have the most interest.

Governments that put out bad warnings are apt to lose the public’s trust, said Sutton. “They're losing the opportunity to be that voice to help people to be safe.”

Sutton gave Grist an example of how the software works: Grist provided her with a recent alert sent by a New Mexico county that was trying to warn residents about flooding on the San Juan River.

The answer, he said, depends on the person receiving it.