Did you use AI during the L.A. wildfires?

A callout to readers.

A balcony burns during the January 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. (Photographer uncredited / CAL FIRE)

Readers, I have a favor to ask: I want you to tell me whether you used AI for anything (or not) during the Los Angeles wildfires. I set up a Google Forms survey at that link, and you can respond anonymously if you like.

I’m especially curious to hear from anybody whose AI habits changed during this disaster: if you normally use AI a lot but started using it less, or if you don’t normally use AI but started using it more.

This callout emerges from a conversation I had yesterday with my friend Mike Ananny, a professor at USC who studies AI and journalism. I told Mike that that, despite all the hype, I was surprised AI hadn’t played a bigger role in how people have engaged with the L.A. wildfires — notwithstanding some AI slop about the Hollywood sign burning and other mostly harmless nonsense on the X app.

Watch Duty’s huge popularity during the fires, for example, is notable to me for not seeming all that AI-forward. Although the nonprofit reported that it “integrated advanced AI” in 2024, Watch Duty CTO David Merritt told Verge reporter Abigail Bassett it’s only for internal routing of alerts and emails. Watch Duty’s output is otherwise heavily reliant on the judgment of its human reporters, who follow an editorial code of conduct like any other professional newsroom. Despite the speed that automated alerts could give you about a new fire, Watch Duty’s ethics policy is that “Accuracy is more important than speed.”

That said, I’m conscious of having a perceptual bias, which is that my own AI use usually falls on the Luddite side of the professional and consumer spectrum. (I don’t let AI touch a word or a comma of this newsletter and don’t use AI art; everything you see here is 100% human.) That’s certainly not the case for a lot of people out there, and it’s been obvious to me that people’s information consumption about the L.A. wildfire disaster is pretty idiosyncratic. I’ve had a couple friends tell me their favorite pairing was Watch Duty alongside local Reddit threads.

So I want to know! What’s your AI use been like through this disaster? I might write about some of the responses here.