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.”
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