AI Emergency Alerts Are Coming. Humans Might Not Be Ready
Source: Wired ·
Human beings struggle with emergency communication. Chatbots can help—if people take them seriously.
From the source
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…