Towards Democratized Flood Risk Management: An Advanced AI Assistant Enabled by GPT-4 for Enhanced Interpretability and Public Engagement

Real-time flood forecasting plays a crucial role in enabling timely and effective emergency responses. However, a significant challenge lies in bridging the gap between complex numerical flood models and practical decision-making. Decision-makers often rely on experts to interpret these models for optimizing flood mitigation strategies. And the public requires complex techniques to inquiry and understand socio-cultural and institutional factors, often hinders the public's understanding of flood risks. To overcome these challenges, our study introduces an innovative solution: a customized AI Assistant powered by the GPT-4 Large Language Model. This AI Assistant is designed to facilitate effective communication between decision-makers, the general public, and flood forecasters, without the requirement of specialized knowledge. The new framework utilizes GPT-4's advanced natural language understanding and function calling capabilities to provide immediate flood alerts and respond to various flood-related inquiries. Our developed prototype integrates real-time flood warnings with flood maps and social vulnerability data. It also effectively translates complex flood zone information into actionable risk management advice. To assess its performance, we evaluated the prototype using six criteria within three main categories: relevance, error resilience, and understanding of context. Our research marks a significant step towards a more accessible and user-friendly approach in flood risk management. This study highlights the potential of advanced AI tools like GPT-4 in democratizing information and enhancing public engagement in critical social and environmental issues.