Responsible GenAI Use During Active Armed Conflict: Evidence from Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms

arXiv:2611.07874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Armed conflict can increase the value of Generative AI (GenAI) while undermining the conditions required for its responsible use. Yet the perspectives of community-based humanitarian responders working under these conditions remain underrepresented in responsible AI research. We examine GenAI use in Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), a community-led humanitarian network, through an exploratory survey of 89 respondents and 15 semi-structured interviews with GenAI users and non-users. War reconfigures GenAI's role, making it most useful where its outputs are hardest to verify. ERR responders turned to GenAI when conflict made human expertise difficult or dangerous to reach. However, participants cautioned that GenAI could not independently establish rapidly changing local conditions, and that relying on its outputs could lead to harmful decisions when human verification was difficult. Risks arose before GenAI was used. For some volunteers, carrying a phone or accessing the internet could expose them to danger. Others were concerned that sharing sensitive beneficiary or operational information with GenAI could put people at risk. Participants feared that AI-assisted reports could undermine their credibility with donors, whose funding sustains the food and medical aid ERRs provide. Access to GenAI was uneven, and volunteers using it sometimes relied on colleagues with relevant expertise or local knowledge to verify its results. Our findings show that responsible use of GenAI during conflict depends not only on model performance or individual adoption, but also on whether responders can safely access these tools, verify their outputs against local conditions, and recognize when limiting or avoiding GenAI is the more responsible choice.