How this site is written
DeKalb ARES is a volunteer organization, and this website is maintained by members in addition to their day jobs. To make that workload sustainable — and to actually keep our public record current — we use generative AI tools (Claude and similar) to help draft narrative content, working from human-supplied source material.
What is AI-drafted
Most of the longer narrative content on the Activity Log — event recaps, drill after-action writeups, gear and infrastructure pieces, weather- event context — is drafted with AI assistance from human source material. The same is true of the rover, about, and what-we-do pages. Draft text is reviewed by a human editor before publishing.
What sources we work from
- Email threads on the DeKalb ARES Groups.io list
- After-action review documents written by members and served-agency partners
- Pre-event briefings (e.g., ARES Briefs for Atlanta Track Club events)
- Public news coverage of weather events and public-service activations
- NWS Peachtree City event archives and public weather data
- Direct contributions from members — photos, summaries, notes
- Public technical documentation for hardware and software discussed on the site
What stays purely human
Operational content — the Net Control schedule, the operational status badge shown at the top of every page, frequency and station details, the leadership roster — is edited directly by members through our content management system. The Skywarn-related procedures, repeater frequencies, and served-agency contact information are taken from primary sources and verified against the live infrastructure.
Editorial review and corrections
Every page is reviewed by a human editor before publishing, and members can revise any entry through our CMS. We encourage readers — members and the public — to report factual errors, misattributions, outdated information, or anything that doesn't reflect the group accurately.
Send corrections to the webmaster, or for content concerns specifically about the EC's role or DKARES operations, the Contact page reaches Emergency Coordinator James W. Penland (N4RAR).
Why we disclose this
Transparency. AI tools have limits — they can confidently misstate a fact, generate plausible-sounding details that don't match reality, or carry forward an error from a source. We believe it's appropriate to tell readers when AI is part of the drafting process so they can apply appropriate skepticism, and so the public record about a volunteer EmComm group reflects what the group actually is.
The radios, the operators, the deployments, the drills, the activations — those are real, and the people behind them are real. The writing about them is sometimes machine-assisted. Both things are true.