Saving the Day
We all like a story, and that’s why we make up so many of them. And we particularly like stories that make sense of seemingly inexplicable things. The big one for me, recently, was how did a county like Kerr, with a river running through it, manage to miss what happened to another county, Hays, which experienced a catastrophic flood in 2015 with its river? The latter, Hays, installed a warning system. The former, Kerr, didn’t.
Unfortunately, these days, while we’re still making news on a regular basis, the reporting of the same has fallen into disrepair. Stories come at us in snippets, coated in ideology, and looking to make a point. In the old days—and I’m old, so that was a long time ago—reporters were only allowed to deal with facts. Adjectives, in fact, were actively discouraged, and facts needed two sources, at least. In the aftermath of the 25 Independence Days floods, I was flooded with snippets and tidbits of info about what happened with Kerr’s efforts to install its warning system, and everything I saw was designed to get a rise out of me.
As a guy who prefers to be informed rather than excited, I stopped the algorithm by watching people dance. I also decided to test what AI could do for me. So I went to two sources—ChatGPT and Claude—and posted a prompt: Summarize in a brief paragraph what's being said about why Kerr County, Texas, failed to install an early warning system along the Guadalupe River, which is prone to flooding. I'm only interested in documented and fact-checked information.
ChatGPT gave me a summary, with links to its sources, while Claude gave me essentially the same set of links, but in a slightly different format, with a slightly different summary. In both cases, however, I feel better informed. I also realized the Kerr County leaders were just people doing the best they could with what they had—and to paraphrase radio host Paul Harvey, that’s how I found the rest of the story. And this is how AI might save me from the algorithm.
