EM1 has contracts with around a hundred government agencies and school districts, but none are using it to automate their extreme weather alerts just yet. For the moment, they’re only using it to workshop plans and internal preparations. Even so, all the experts interviewed for this story said they are certain that many emergency managers are already using chatbots to write messages, even if they won’t admit it. Sutton said that the emergency managers who take her alert training sessions often present her with high-quality alerts they have drafted in seconds using ChatGPT or Gemini.
“Official adoption is pretty low, but people are unofficially using it, absolutely,” said Sarah Miller, a professor of emergency management at Pierce College in Florida and a longtime instructor at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. “They’re using their own personal accounts, or they’re using free ones.”
It sounds like an easy trade-off: if AI is better and faster than humans, and the difference between a good alert and a bad alert can be life and death, we should be using AI for every heat wave and wildfire. Yet even researchers who are bullish on chatbot technology say that making the switch could backfire. Members of the public who are skeptical of AI or who don’t trust the government in the first place may spurn agencies that publish AI-generated graphics or social media posts. In Syracuse, New York, for instance, a union of public employees sued the local government for using an AI service to answer non-emergency 911 calls.
“We trust things that we perceive [are] authentic and care about us,” said Ginny Katz, the founder of HazAdapt, a consultancy that helps disaster officials figure out how to use technology. “AI-generated content does not feel authentic.” There’s also a risk that chatbots could allow emergency managers to send out more alerts, and faster, which could increase the risk of warning fatigue.
As is the case in other areas where AI is being deployed, disaster experts say that for the moment the software is only as capable as the person using it. A seasoned emergency manager might be able to speed up their communication with the public by having a chatbot draft a series of alerts, but an inexperienced one rushing to create an urgent alert won’t know how to evaluate the output of a model like ChatGPT or Claude.
Even though the technology is a ways off from being able to perform without a human expert in the loop, that hasn’t stopped many understaffed emergency management departments from using it. As for how the proliferation of AI-generated content is affecting public trust in government, experts say it’s too early to tell.
“If you had a human sending you a text message versus a computer sending you a text message, which one would you believe is being more accurate?” said Justin Snair, the founder of Preppr, another company that offers AI software to emergency managers.
The answer, he said, depends on the person receiving it.