OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance? People being lead astray with information from the government could lead to very serious consequences, up to and including imprisonment.
Honest question, I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.
Painfully this will fall to the court decide and create the precedence here. If this is an official government app, then the onus probably is on the government to provide correct information? Who knows, it could go either way and the courts could say "you're on the hook".
I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.
The Supreme Court has already held that a government agent giving someone bad advice about the law is not an excuse (unless it rises to the level of “affirmative misconduct”): <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/785/#tab-opinion-1954000" rel="nofollow">https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/785/#tab-opi...
What happens now if someone uses traditional search and comes across an outdated wiki or Confluence page with outdated/wrong/bad instructions, or interprets something incorrectly?
Perhaps. But that’s never been the law in the U.S. <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/785/#tab-opinion-1954000" rel="nofollow">https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/785/#tab-opi...
I’m responding to your point that it would be “unacceptable” for a regular government website to provide wrong information. The case I linked to says that the government isn’t responsible for mistakes in what the government tells you about the law. If someone in the social security office says the law is X, but it’s actually Y, then the citizen is still required to follow Y.
It has always been the person's problem to solve, even after this website.
No government employee is your lawyer. If the government gives you incomplete or wrong information, you are still liable for not doing the correct thing.
Having a website that does a best guess at what steps a person must take after changing a name or getting married is better than nothing, but the status quo isn't "nothing".
It needs to be kept up-to-the-minute updated and it can't skip any nuance / details. Does anyone here really trust the lackeys who spectacularly failed at DOGE to do boring and highly detailed work?
> but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance
You have to measure that problem against the status quo, which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on.
Speak for yourself (your country). In the EU I have interacted with several government websites which are better, faster, clearer than most other websites. Not always perfect (what is) but not frustrating either. People love to complain, but year over year I have seen steady improvements in usability. Phone support has always been better than any commercial entity, too (or it was, I haven’t needed it in years).
To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
U.S. government websites are usually pretty good post-Obama. But any structured website is too complicated for a lot of the population to navigate. They don’t even know what agency does the thing they need.
When you need to work with the government, the last thing you want is a program limited by a specific set of rules and interfaces. You want a person who understands your (sometimes unique) issue, who knows how things actually work, and can work around the restrictions imposed upon programs. Someone who can pick up a phone, help you out of bureaucratic corners.
As an American, I've never had issues navigating government websites. That said, I'm also not part of the apparently huge portion of our population who can't read above 6th grade, which I suspect is more of the issue than anything said here thus far.
Well we can’t exactly hang those people out to dry after failing them in our educational system. I refuse to believe that many Americans are simply incapable of reading beyond that level. I believe it is a failure of our culture.
I didn't say anything about them being incapable. That said I'm curious what a chatbot solves for people you concede have been failed by our culture to a degree where they can't read?
I know you didn’t say that, I said that. I said it because I was adding emphasis to the idea that these people are, in a sense, victims.
It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
> I know you didn’t say that, I said that. I said it because I was adding emphasis to the idea that these people are, in a sense, victims.
And I agree but your comment, IMO, reads accusatory. If that's not the case no worries.
> It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
I mean, sure, if it's accurate. Given these things' propensity to just make shit up, as stated, that feels like a way to make the problem worse, if anything.
Nope! Not being accusatory, I’m just a very bad writer lol.
I think the major concern I’m picking up is that the potential for misinformation is high, though maybe we can agree it won’t necessarily be common. One person might get told to pour it in a ditch, but statistically most will be told to dispose of it properly. I also don’t think “the LLM made me do it” will work, or at least not for long, and at least not for companies. Maybe an elderly owner could get away with a fine and a reminder not to do it again, but if you’re big enough for lawyers (and thus big enough to really do damage), you’ll be expected to know better. Judges ARE still humans!
You can talk to the chat bot, or the input prompt and then in turn read out the results by screen reader. Does not solve the comprehension aspect though
I would be careful not to confuse navigating a government built website with finding information and records from government related entities. Those two are not the same issue and shouldn’t be painted as such regardless of one’s reading or comprehension (IMHO)
Throughout school my reading comprehension surpassed most of my peers. For most of my early career I was a writer. Yet I also have ADHD, and one of the ways that manifests is that I really struggle with the dense, bureaucratic language on so many government websites (same with insurance sites). I have to actively force my brain to refocus on the text multiple times per paragraph. I often just find myself skimming and then simply proceeding through a process of trial and error, fixing issues if I missed a caveat somewhere, and otherwise just crossing my fingers on form submission and hoping I did it right.
> To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to always come into play. The second group tends to win over time as their objective is easier to satisfy
> which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on
If only there was an office that cross-agency allowed for a consistent and reasonable design of all public pages and that they are accessible... like the uk <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17s14k4/how_did_we_end_up_with_such_a_good_govuk_system/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17s14k4/how_did_we_e...
The parent was obviously talking about the US government. But the UK still has plenty of legacy websites and even on the new websites there are sometimes complicated or hard to understand rules one must follow. I think a bigger thing in the UK though is that, for the most part, legislation (and legal contracts) tend to be drafted in less arcane language while still being reasonably precise, compared to the US
Giving people a big list of life events isn’t nearly as easy as allowing them to just type in what’s going on and having an LLM figure out what’s relevant to them.
It isn’t nearly as easy but it’s more reliable whereas using an llm is prone to unknown hallucinations (also ignoring the obvious ethical considerations of llms).
15 years ago I was talking to my HR rep about covering my child on healthcare. Her other parent and I were not married. “No you can’t cover her!” “Why not, I’m one of the two parents?” “Because you’re not married!” “So what?”
Cool, but the information on government websites generally meets a higher standard than just ‘making shit up all the time’ so it’s not really a relevant comparison.
Kind of like saying something happens "all the time" and sharing a single example from 15 years ago. Not to mention that a private company's HR team is not the government.
Yes, but when a human makes shit up, they're still legally liable for what they said, and depending on context can be compelled to fix the issue or lose their job.
If an LLM makes shit up, your one and only recourse is "computer says no".
We were discussing zoning in another thread, I think your comment here is very appropriate. People make up all sorts of reasons to oppose land use, which is part of the reason municipal land control is so dangerous.
I encounter it daily in the LLM outputs my coworkers produce.
I see it every day in the text, images, and video posted by AI proponents on social media. Full of errors and wtfs and the people posting the tripe don't seem to notice it.
Maybe you've just stopped paying attention so you don't notice as much anymore?
My coworkers can be wrong, sure. But no, they weren't making stuff up pre-LLMs. But now making stuff up is automated and easy, so we've gone from simply mistaken to piles of "what the hell is this even trying to say?"
Maybe some things just are not easy. Maybe they should not be. Maybe you should be able to have basic citizenship skills to survive in a modern democ… Erm, whatever it is you guys are doing now.
As far as I can tell, the america.gov LLM is mostly providing links to the landing pages you would have found through classical web search. Perhaps with a little bit of clarifying information when there are multiple choices.
Honestly, using an LLM the way america.gov does it, is pretty much the same thing as using search engines, except the result you wanted is almost always in the first result, not 2/3 of the way down the 4th page. Or 42nd on a list of things you are not interested in at all. So much more efficient!
NZ does a pretty good job at it too: <a href="https://www.govt.nz/browse/family-and-whanau/having-a-baby/" rel="nofollow">https://www.govt.nz/browse/family-and-whanau/having-a-baby/
I have my doubts. France ranks just one spot above Lithuania and in fucking sucked in Lithuania <a href="https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/wb_government_effectiveness/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/wb_government_effe...
reminds me of Minitel. France had online services for a lot of daily life back in 1982. Britain's equivalents weren't as good, but still miles ahead of America for about a decade, until the late 90s Web boom.
We had Prestel and Micronet (a form of viewdata; Micronet was hosted on Prestel, but was frequently the reason people signed up for Prestel in the first place), and there were also individual BBSes available.
no. humans can be held accountable and learn from their mistakes.
they can be taught where they went wrong.
if a pattern emerges they can be moved to a role more fitting for them. or removed from a project entirely.
we can judge their effectiveness from past performance.
we can put them in less important roles and gauge whether or not they should be moved up.
so, no, pretending that the correct route forward is to “remove humans from the equation” for a bot that doesn’t learn, is never held accountable, and not held to the same standard as humans is silly tier thinking.
I have read the opening chapters of the book, and honestly I had to put it down after reading 20 percent of the book. I just don't see any new information that I had already known (rightwing effect, propaganda, Fox/Breitbait nonsense, bla bla).
I used to believe Trump winning the 2016 election was a product of rightwing propaganda and fringe theory, but with the 2024 election, I had to revise my belief. What if this is the mainstream mindset of Americans all along, and Trump simply tried to capitalize on that?
If I instruct an employee to prioritize my profit in a way that opens both of us to criminal prosecution, there is a non zero chance of them whistle blowing or even cooperating with the authorities to prosecute me.
depending on which model one is using, and the error the employee needs to be retrained on, i strongly disagree that you can retrain an llm as easily as you can a person.
particularly most of the commercial models.
again, i’m sure we can all come up with a thousand “hypotheticals”, but i’ll state again, “entirely removing human” from the situation is silly.
particularly as even the ceos of frontier producing models will each and every single one tell you to never trust their model.
“our model is smartest thing in the world…”
…next breath..
“wait, you trusted our model? that was silly of you. always double check it”
We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?
This seems like a great source for domain-specific RL, but even without that, we can expect there to be higher-quality LLMs that can be trivially swapped in within a year, if not a week.
Okay, but I don't understand what you're getting at with them not learning? They acquire more information, get better at providing accurate and relevant information, and acquire new skills. What is the learning they're not doing?
Maybe a human should be available as a backup or something, but not because LLMs don't "learn" -- the system seems to learn in all relevant senses.
(I'd also object to the no accountability, but another subthread is already on that.)
From which equation? Because we're talking about humans who need to interact with the government, which is... pretty much everyone. And, yeah, I guess omnicide would solve the immediate problem.
The status quo is people googling shit, finding either legalese they can't understand (but maybe think that they do) or information that was legitimate ten years ago (and is dangerously inaccurate today). If I ask a question and get an answer that's been inaccurate for years I'm going to have as much or more false confidence as an AI bot that misunderstands the source. The difference is the AI bot gets better with time instead of worse. It may not be perfect but it's a step in the right direction: Let them cook.
No, someone who gets a bad answer from a random source is not going to have as much false confidence as someone who gets bad advice from a .gov domain.
Isn't that kind of a good thing at the scale of a government? Each task should be hard, use a lot of energy, to ensure it's important enough to do. The DMV should take 1/2 day of work. Otherwise people's egos start think they have it all figured out and then people start imagining improvements and become dissatisfied. Wouldn't this just lead to unrest and resentment?
> You have to measure that problem against the status quo, which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on.
The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.
I don't know for the gov. For HR, the best approach I've seen is to have source and links extremely prominent and have the bot speak like a mascot ("bip bip boop I'm the HR bot" style)
People don't read disclaimers nor warnings about the content, but usually won't come to the HR to complain a mascot fed them weird info they didn't bother to check.
> people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
Meh, the kind of person who would accept bot output without even reading its sources are already trusting the world's dumbest model, Google's "AI Overview" by searching and reading that instead of clicking any results. If we can get even some of them to start out at america.gov instead of google.com for those questions, it's likely going to be far higher quality due to using a better model and having been trained, I assume, to only answer using knowledge from a .gov primary source rather than guessing based on vibes, or on jokes once seen on Reddit, as AI Overview tends to.
> I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
The bar for something like this should not be 100% accuracy. It should be 100% accountability and transparency, followed by being at least as accurate as google search.
Similar to autonomous driving: it doesn't need to be perfect, just less likely than humans are at causing an accident.
I strongly disagree. The preferred accuracy of an official government source of information should be higher than a google search. The bar should be as close to 100% accuracy as possible as well as 100% accountability and transparency.
"Sometimes computers just make shit up now but that's OK because humans do to and if they do we can just sue them" should not be acceptable.
You can disagree but the fact is people will take the path of least resistance. I'm not saying we shoudldn't strive for 100% accuracy but we also need to be realistic about what an LLM is. I'd rather we not pretend there's some magical combination of weights out there that will make it completely perfect.
I'd rather we not feel obligated to use LLMs for purposes they aren't suited to rather than just "being realistic" about the consequences of using them everywhere for everything.
Let's bring the subject back into focus: This is an example of an LLM being used to search a massive database of scattered text and files. Are you saying LLM's are not suited for searching through text?
>This is an example of an LLM being used to search a massive database of scattered text and files.
That isn't how LLMs work. LLMs are statistical language models, not search engines[0,1]. They can be prompted to call external software to search databases, but they themselves are not capable of doing so, and more often than not they generate responses based on their own model, which may not be accurate. We've had technology that was capable of searching databases for decades without the quirk of not being capable of presenting that information accurately.
>Are you saying LLM's are not suited for searching through text?
I am saying that first and foremost they don't do that and furthermore that they are less suited as a substitute for that than what we had before. An obvious example of this is the AI feature of Google Search, which I've seen hallucinate results numerous times. But you can also look up the numerous times AI has fabricated citations when used in scientific research.
no, not at all. in addition, the funding should be spent on organizing that database in a more easily searchable format and system instead of introducing a stochastic prediction engine.
The problem is that this isn’t possible without making it impenetrable to ordinary people. It’s a usability problem with tradeoffs.
My local county government has a pretty good website, but even then it’s completely overwhelming if you try to find something off the happy path of the most common services/tasks. I can’t imagine the nightmare of trying to organize a federal portal manually and keep it up to date. Plain search isn’t sufficient because there are so many overlapping functions that are just slightly different.
I hate to say it, but this is one area that an LLM assistant actually makes sense. Maybe it needs a second validation pass with routing to a human assistant if it can’t figure out how to give an accurate answer to a query.
They can take it as authoritative, but that won't change the consequences if they're wrong. This is already a thing between two people; "my cop friend told me it was okay" isn't a legal defense. Changing the 2nd person to an AI doesn't change much, both are still agents of the government.
Doesn't really have any bearing on a similar system for HR. The government is sort of unique in a bunch of ways, but not really being responsible for what their low level agents say is one of them.
I'm not sure how to fix that, to be honest. I'm also not sure how much worse it is than trying to Google it? Google is full of stuff that's either wrong, or won't apply for a reason that takes some reading comprehension to grasp (e.g. state-specific rules/programs/etc).
> how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
Compare this with the benchmark.
Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.
There's a ton of hearsay and rumor about how the US Government works, even among educated/sophisticated people who are dextrous with bureaucracy. The problem gets much worse as you go down the educational ladder, which is most of the US population.
The Perfect, please meet The Good. You are not enemies.
If you're really curious, I want to get a Type-86 tasting license for my store. The ABC site[1] says my kind of store (<5000sqft) is "generally" not qualified, which makes it sound like there are exceptions (spoiler: there are).
The first agent told me that the license is not an add-on, meaning I'd have to complete a very long process to obtain the license. This was wrong. It's an add-on.
The second agent told me that I was not eligible because I have less than 5000sqft of space. Not true (see below).
The third told my wife that 75% of the items in our store need to be alcoholic beverages to qualify. Wrong again.
I finally asked my legal LLM, which pointed me to the statute, which says, "Type-86 ... can be issued to businesses which also hold off-sale retail licenses [that] earn at least 75 percent of their total gross sales from the sale of alcoholic beverages." Ultimately, it comes down to how ABC interprets and enforces this law, so I really expected to get some clarity from them rather than complete falsities.
This is an official website of the US government. There's zero reason to give grace here for a poor implementation, especially one that is meant to make services easier to find and use.
It would be worth testing, but yes, it’s unlikely that whatever model (s) are behind it they are tuned and guardrailed to, e.g., only give official government information from government domains.
That being said, I’m aware of a vulnerability in that regard of it is attending to guardrail answers to the .gov and .mil domains.
So you're saying that the massive companies currently being sued for breaking the law are giving a gift to the government overseeing the courts? Somehow mere "bribe" seems inadequate.
Yeah, let's try to not remember that one of those companies trained its models on CSAM and currently charges users money to create CSAM. Cheer up! Be happy your tax dollars go to support their continued existence! And if you're a victim, relax and enjoy I guess?
Yeah, I was curious if it was going to try and bombard me with a bunch of bullshit about how wonderful our glorious Trump godking is, but honestly the information it gave was reasonable enough.
how many felonies has the president of the united states been charged with?
>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope
has biden ever been convicted of a crime?
>I did not find official records of a criminal conviction for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
>Official sources in this search discuss other matters (for example, a pardon for Robert Hunter Biden), not a conviction of Joseph R. Biden Jr. I cannot independently confirm a complete nationwide criminal-history search from these pages
>[Link to Department of Justice Pardon warrant (Hunter Biden)]
has any other president ever been convicted of a crime?
>Yes. A Congressional Research Service brief reports that on May 30, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree
Funny that it would only talk about trump's convictions after bringing up hunter biden.
The crazy thing is that it did answer questions about Trump, but that has been blocked. Either allow it or don't, do not pick favorites, but this isn't how this admin rolls.
> If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.
To pile on, they have even shown they don't even know the difference between 'searching' and 'accepting as correct the output of a braindead, cut-rate AI model' - as proven by the success of "AI Overview." People need all the help they can get.
I mean think about the magnitude of services and conflicting information there probably is from the us government. Just getting clarifying information on the trusted traveler program is a pain today, and that's just a single service. Imagine trying to figure out medicaid eligibility, social security disability, and any number of other things that would be helpful.
I threw some legitimate questions at it today and got helpful answers in response.
Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
>it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
The main lesson learned was that it was ineffective to rely entirely on outsourcing. The government needs top-notch engineering talent in-house. This led to the creation of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a fantastic group of people which did some of the best web design and engineering on the planet.
Trump killed them, of course, and the website is now entitled "United States DOGE Service". I hope that, some day, I will no longer be embarrassed to be an American.
afaik <a href="https://ndstudio.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://ndstudio.gov/ (and GSA?) are now the ones responsible for such in-house engineering?
National Design Studio is unproductive and does shoddy work. They have launched a handful of single-page sites. Many of these are full of AI slop, got caught running illegal trackers, failed accessibility audits, ignore established design standards and conventions, contain little useful information, or are heavy on bandwidth and CPU. They are flashy. They are not fit for purpose.
Seriously, just look at this crap. Fonts so large they become hard to read blurring into existence as I scroll, giant autoplaying video chewing up my bandwidth and CPU, giant useless pictures, a "food pyramid" even harder to read than the one from the '90s, low-contrast colors, not a citation in sight, one picture too small to read that can be expanded by clicking on it with no indication of this interaction, and it looks nothing like any other government website in existence. The total page weight is over 30 megs. Worthless at conveying information, but it looks capital-M Modern (and gives me a capital-M Migraine).
(The information is crap, too, but you already knew that.)
GSA's work was mainly done by 18F. Which was also destroyed by Musk and pals at the same time they destroyed USDS.
What made USDS (and 18F) special was not merely having web developers in the executive branch. It was that they were among the best in the world, and drove standardization and improvement across the entire government. Now we've got AI bros with buckets of eye-catching (eye-melting) slop.
Ok if the real experts were the reason we couldn't have what we have today, I'm glad we got rid of the experts. The new design is absolutely brilliant.
The visuals are good, a little too much white space for my taste but flashy eye catching sites are great. It just needs optimization and a proper a11y audit. This is also an information/propaganda site so it doesn't need to show everything at first sight like it's a critical service.
Clarity is important for things like filing your taxes or applying for a visa, and even then you don't need a boring design to do the job. All it takes is serious amounts of UX testing done by someone with real experience.
Hard disagree. I have no desire whatsoever to scroll through five pages of inch-high letters fading in and out to get a paragraph's worth of information. I find it ugly and I think it's not very useful.
But that's kind of irrelevant. This is a government website. A >30 MiB download; poor support for reader mode, custom CSS, or screen readers; excessive animation; and low contrast are all objectively poor for accessibility. This is why the people in 18F and USDS made websites that look different from private industry: the goal is to provide essential services and information to everyone, not to make a real impression on the subset of the population that can use the site.
I can see how LLMs might be useful for this kind of thing but I'm struggling to think of how this will be better than just asking ChatGPT the same questions.
The first suggestion I saw was "I just got married, how do I change my last name?"
It tells you to update your Social Security info first and gives you some helpful links.
ChatGPT tells me the same things with some of the same links. It didn't even have to ask if I was in America because it found my state based off my IP I assume.
Yeah that's a fair point. We shouldn't have to rely on private companies for this kind of thing.
On the other hand this is just going through one or more of the big AI companies anyway. So they still get data from users, now we're just funding them with our taxes instead of using one of many LLM interfaces available for free.
The privacy policy actually looks OK though, I'll be interested to see what the EFF has to say.
I’m a bit torn on that matter. I haven’t looked into it, but I suspect it’s not some kind of specialized foundational model trained to be a federal agent.
It’s likely just a mask of either ChatGPT and probably through some massively bloated, nepotistic federal contract. There may be some additional guidelines and instructions but it’s probably not RAG on anything that isn’t publicly slay accessible to any other model, even if it is hard limited to federal sites/domains.
In addition to what others have said, ChatGPT is also available free and without an account I believe. What are you more likely to think of when you have a question, your AI service you already use and have your information in and maybe even has access to your documents, or are you going to remember to go to America.gov for basic chat AI?
Frankly, it would be really interesting to benchmark it against the other models when it comes to accomplishing things related to the government, i.e. Which information is more accurate, useful, and actionable.
There’s also another matter I find a bit troubling depending on the nature of how this came about, it could also be something that creates an inextricable incumbency in whichever AI company is behind it, i.e., how Microsoft has become a kind of parasite on government and thereby on corporations for many decades now.
1. Americans pay for it with tax dollars and personal data.
2. US won't run their own local model they simply use one of the three who's the coziest with the government paying it $$$ and user data. And there was no request for proposals or public tender.
>Americans pay for it with tax dollars and personal data.
From the privacy policy[1], "Our AI providers operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements and retain none of your prompts or the responses they generate. America.gov’s own response cache is separate and is described in Section 5.
Our AI providers are contractually prohibited from selling your information, building an advertising profile, or training their AI models with your data."
I know what you're saying, but OpenAI is an independent, profit driven company. They will make decisions that are in the best interests of the company, not the US. You really need something that is for the people (taxpayers), by the people (gov).
The whole industry is dealing with this now. You think current AI is not reliable enough for a task, so you augment it with know how to fix the problem, thoroughly test it, then decide to release it as a product. In the six months you took to do that, models improved enough that they work fine out of the box on your task.
In a sane world the US government’s chatbot would have the advantage that, as a representative of the government that they proactively decided to provide, it would at least be able to speak authoritatively on the government’s position on the law. Apparently this isn’t the case based on other comments, though, so it seems sort of pointless?
It's a great idea in the abstract, but I don't feel compelled to be a goldfish about this. I would like to see them explain why they turned off Direct File and what's different here before concluding that the administration has some principled commitment to digital accessibility.
I can't help but notice, for example, that the system prompt is not public information.
Okay, but most AI agents are so keen to get you an answer that they will give a bad one rather than saying "I'm not sure", which means giving links to malware or untrustworthy software.
> It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished
Maybe the federal government could use some of its powers to prevent literal phishing and scam sites from showing up in the advertising for the first, top listed results from search engines when non-technical boomers (or technical knowledge equivalent of) search for certain basic services. It seems there's very little actual evaluation by the ad-serving-entities of whether the destination of an ad is a legitimate thing these days.
I agree with this to the extent that it works. As a non-American the ESTA system is the main way to get phished, google it on a bad day and you get endless scams in the ad slots. “Check ESTA status” here links you to the CBP site, which is enormously better than Google.
They probably need to teach it the keyword though, I started with “ESTA” and it replied to me in Spanish telling me to ask it a question :)
OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out who the pedophiles are and who guards them. It’s also easy to get raped by convicted felons. If they can figure out how to fk people out of all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the rich and rapists.
"at a high level" is doing a lot of work.
I know some companies that at a high level want to "organize the world's information" or "build the future of human connection", yet have done innumerable cruel and harmful things to society (at least in my opinion).
It's can't customise the response to the person asking the question in quite the way putting a massively expensive compute behind each user interaction.
And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.
Because Americans are notoriously and demonstrably bad at understanding the architecture of their own government, including the layer-cake nature of authority and responsibility delegation.
Type "affordable housing", click "Contact your nearest public housing agency (PHA)"
It is less effort and requires less time than america.gov's:
Type "find affordable housing near me", wait praying for relevant results, recieve irrelevant results due to my rural isp having flaky geoip, told to click on the same link I already got grom usa.gov or one of three other irrelevant links or call this irrelevant phone number.
So my tax dollars are now funding a worse way to get worse results to people who can't use a well formatted site that they won't benefit from because they'll trust it implicitly despite it being demonstrably less reliable.
The usa.gov site is a good start, but it’s not really comprehensive, and I’m not sure it can be.
A few queries that I couldn’t find answers to through that site:
* How can you get a permit for a group event in a national forest?
* How can I become a federal contractor as a small business?
* Where do I go to get an amateur radio license and what are the steps involved?
* What are the requirements for purchasing tribal land?
Basically usa.gov seems to mainly exist for people following the “happy path”—go to school, get a job or run a simple business, get health insurance, buy a house, retire. It’s got a few exceptions for large minority groups. But the issue is that the total number of people deviating from that path is huge, even if they only need to find one thing that’s not on the path. Right now they rely on commercial search to get answers, which often leads them to scam sites or intermediaries who take a cut for filing paperwork.
Gov.uk is basically a pre-LLM america.gov that was done beautifully well. And you're guaranteed to not get hallucinated answers too. Searching and indexing works on it beautifully, as do the many functions you can carry out from the web itself instead of visiting a govt office in person.
canada.ca is the Canadian government's equivalent, as far as a web 1.0-style portal/index into many other sites and resources.
Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.
It's great that you recognize that as your opinion.
I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.
Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.
Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.
I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.
You missed the point they were trying to make: a company’s mission statement says they want to help humanity at a high level, but it turns out they’re doing more harm to it. We can’t control being born or nature. Humans control the companies in question that are doing the harm. You wrote a nothing burger. Almost like an AI slopping out text for the sake of noise.
One must consider the possibility that the goal is unattainable without the harm.
A terrorist finds it much easier to execute on insidious plans if the world's information on vulnerabilities and weapons are organized at their fingertips, for example.
Being part of and accelerating the ad-driven internet, drinking up water for data centers, not filtering out scam apps and websites from its results and store, intrusive collection of private information, etc etc.
Why is this downvoted? Google is responsible for every literally malicious ad attempting to harm people that they display.
There is a big difference between "these ads have flashing lights and take up half the screen and are annoying" and "this ad is attempting to defraud you".
You can support the incredible things Google have achieved over the last couple of decades ... while also acknowledging the absolute shit shows they've been involved with.
I don't think they're saying that America.gov is necessarily cruel and harmful― I read it as a reminder that holding lofty ideals (as exemplified by Google and Facebook) doesn't necessarily preclude wrongdoing; the risks posed by presenting unedited LLM output as "from America.gov" are worth consideration imo
a couple of months ago I asked my fellow lawyer for help to explain to me an official letter I got from the government, since it was quite confusing. it took him awhile before he could interpret what they wanted to say in the letter. when I asked my lawyer about the reason for them to make it so complicated, he just said that lawyers in the government make laws complicated so that you will have to hire another lawyer to help you to understand what they want, otherwise, nobody would ever need lawyer
I find it hard to believe individuals in the government do not spend a significant amount of effort and time creating situations/laws/opportunities to pad the pockets and maintain contracts for targeted individuals. While maybe not "gov lawyers writing complex laws to prop up the law industry", but definitely "lawmakers getting pushed by lobbyists to create complex laws to tie up common folk", or "lemme give this contract to my buddy so he gets rich and gives me a kick back". While not your main point, the gov is def by and large a 'make-work program'.
maherbeg · · focus · HN ↗
daveguy · · focus · HN ↗
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[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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gthrow12345 · · focus · HN ↗
Honest question, I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.
maherbeg · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
BalinKing · · focus · HN ↗
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
BalinKing · · focus · HN ↗
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
gusgus01 · · focus · HN ↗
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
mpyne · · focus · HN ↗
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thephyber · · focus · HN ↗
No government employee is your lawyer. If the government gives you incomplete or wrong information, you are still liable for not doing the correct thing.
Having a website that does a best guess at what steps a person must take after changing a name or getting married is better than nothing, but the status quo isn't "nothing".
It needs to be kept up-to-the-minute updated and it can't skip any nuance / details. Does anyone here really trust the lackeys who spectacularly failed at DOGE to do boring and highly detailed work?
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
You have to measure that problem against the status quo, which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on.
latexr · · focus · HN ↗
To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
deadbabe · · focus · HN ↗
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
stldev · · focus · HN ↗
When you need to work with the government, the last thing you want is a program limited by a specific set of rules and interfaces. You want a person who understands your (sometimes unique) issue, who knows how things actually work, and can work around the restrictions imposed upon programs. Someone who can pick up a phone, help you out of bureaucratic corners.
BubbleRings · · focus · HN ↗
America.gov AI: Call the Patent Electronic Business Center for USPTO.gov account and customer-number association issues. Toll-free: 866-217-9197
Not bad at all!
ToucanLoucan · · focus · HN ↗
kulahan · · focus · HN ↗
ToucanLoucan · · focus · HN ↗
kulahan · · focus · HN ↗
It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
ToucanLoucan · · focus · HN ↗
And I agree but your comment, IMO, reads accusatory. If that's not the case no worries.
> It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
I mean, sure, if it's accurate. Given these things' propensity to just make shit up, as stated, that feels like a way to make the problem worse, if anything.
kulahan · · focus · HN ↗
I think the major concern I’m picking up is that the potential for misinformation is high, though maybe we can agree it won’t necessarily be common. One person might get told to pour it in a ditch, but statistically most will be told to dispose of it properly. I also don’t think “the LLM made me do it” will work, or at least not for long, and at least not for companies. Maybe an elderly owner could get away with a fine and a reminder not to do it again, but if you’re big enough for lawyers (and thus big enough to really do damage), you’ll be expected to know better. Judges ARE still humans!
seb1204 · · focus · HN ↗
ct520 · · focus · HN ↗
setsewerd · · focus · HN ↗
godelski · · focus · HN ↗
buriram · · focus · HN ↗
If your salary is 40k euros with no advancement in career and keep being threatened you would be replaced with AI, I highly doubt anyone would care.
seb1204 · · focus · HN ↗
braiamp · · focus · HN ↗
If only there was an office that cross-agency allowed for a consistent and reasonable design of all public pages and that they are accessible... like the uk <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17s14k4/how_did_we_end_up_with_such_a_good_govuk_system/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17s14k4/how_did_we_e...
kevin_thibedeau · · focus · HN ↗
dukeyukey · · focus · HN ↗
dan-robertson · · focus · HN ↗
tokioyoyo · · focus · HN ↗
Isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why an average user gives up and closes the tab?
rerdavies · · focus · HN ↗
LelouBil · · focus · HN ↗
I France service-public.gouv.fr is amazing
<a href="https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F16225" rel="nofollow">https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1...
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
doc_ick · · focus · HN ↗
irishcoffee · · focus · HN ↗
Humans also make shit up all the time.
astafrig · · focus · HN ↗
irishcoffee · · focus · HN ↗
lkbm · · focus · HN ↗
5upplied_demand · · focus · HN ↗
Kind of like saying something happens "all the time" and sharing a single example from 15 years ago. Not to mention that a private company's HR team is not the government.
dansquizsoft · · focus · HN ↗
unrented7977 · · focus · HN ↗
If an LLM makes shit up, your one and only recourse is "computer says no".
Schiendelman · · focus · HN ↗
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
kijashdkujdfhas · · focus · HN ↗
I see it every day in the text, images, and video posted by AI proponents on social media. Full of errors and wtfs and the people posting the tripe don't seem to notice it.
Maybe you've just stopped paying attention so you don't notice as much anymore?
rerdavies · · focus · HN ↗
kijashdkujdfhas · · focus · HN ↗
delis-thumbs-7e · · focus · HN ↗
drstewart · · focus · HN ↗
Okay. So why should government websites like the French one be well designed? Maybe it should not be.
LelouBil · · focus · HN ↗
rerdavies · · focus · HN ↗
Honestly, using an LLM the way america.gov does it, is pretty much the same thing as using search engines, except the result you wanted is almost always in the first result, not 2/3 of the way down the 4th page. Or 42nd on a list of things you are not interested in at all. So much more efficient!
wingworks · · focus · HN ↗
dzhiurgis · · focus · HN ↗
I was recently back to Europe and it’s basically comedy (tragedy to be precise) how bureaucratic the whole system is.
my-next-account · · focus · HN ↗
pranit1 · · focus · HN ↗
dzhiurgis · · focus · HN ↗
consensus1 · · focus · HN ↗
kulahan · · focus · HN ↗
tessierashpool · · focus · HN ↗
dash2 · · focus · HN ↗
flir · · focus · HN ↗
Sophira · · focus · HN ↗
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kulahan · · focus · HN ↗
toofy · · focus · HN ↗
they can be taught where they went wrong.
if a pattern emerges they can be moved to a role more fitting for them. or removed from a project entirely.
we can judge their effectiveness from past performance.
we can put them in less important roles and gauge whether or not they should be moved up.
so, no, pretending that the correct route forward is to “remove humans from the equation” for a bot that doesn’t learn, is never held accountable, and not held to the same standard as humans is silly tier thinking.
buriram · · focus · HN ↗
As an individual, yes. As a population, no. They elected a conman twice and would rather burn down the country rather than changing their view.
intended · · focus · HN ↗
buriram · · focus · HN ↗
I used to believe Trump winning the 2016 election was a product of rightwing propaganda and fringe theory, but with the 2024 election, I had to revise my belief. What if this is the mainstream mindset of Americans all along, and Trump simply tried to capitalize on that?
intended · · focus · HN ↗
buriram · · focus · HN ↗
olmo23 · · focus · HN ↗
bad bots can be retrained or shut down far more easily
rapidaneurism · · focus · HN ↗
I don't see such a path with an llm.
toofy · · focus · HN ↗
particularly most of the commercial models.
again, i’m sure we can all come up with a thousand “hypotheticals”, but i’ll state again, “entirely removing human” from the situation is silly.
particularly as even the ceos of frontier producing models will each and every single one tell you to never trust their model.
“our model is smartest thing in the world…”
…next breath..
“wait, you trusted our model? that was silly of you. always double check it”
dansquizsoft · · focus · HN ↗
lkbm · · focus · HN ↗
This seems like a great source for domain-specific RL, but even without that, we can expect there to be higher-quality LLMs that can be trivially swapped in within a year, if not a week.
toofy · · focus · HN ↗
i didn’t say this at all. did you respond to the wrong comment? i was responding to the person who said:
> … remove humans from the equation, then.
lkbm · · focus · HN ↗
toofy · · focus · HN ↗
> We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?
lkbm · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe a human should be available as a backup or something, but not because LLMs don't "learn" -- the system seems to learn in all relevant senses.
(I'd also object to the no accountability, but another subthread is already on that.)
rerdavies · · focus · HN ↗
andrewflnr · · focus · HN ↗
kulahan · · focus · HN ↗
I was referring to the government side, as a mild quip.
maxk42 · · focus · HN ↗
andrewflnr · · focus · HN ↗
intended · · focus · HN ↗
butlike · · focus · HN ↗
basscomm · · focus · HN ↗
The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.
makeitdouble · · focus · HN ↗
People don't read disclaimers nor warnings about the content, but usually won't come to the HR to complain a mascot fed them weird info they didn't bother to check.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
makeitdouble · · focus · HN ↗
vulcan01 · · focus · HN ↗
xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
Meh, the kind of person who would accept bot output without even reading its sources are already trusting the world's dumbest model, Google's "AI Overview" by searching and reading that instead of clicking any results. If we can get even some of them to start out at america.gov instead of google.com for those questions, it's likely going to be far higher quality due to using a better model and having been trained, I assume, to only answer using knowledge from a .gov primary source rather than guessing based on vibes, or on jokes once seen on Reddit, as AI Overview tends to.
hiddencost · · focus · HN ↗
We'd be better off with naive people than monsters like you in my opinion.
edoceo · · focus · HN ↗
totallymike · · focus · HN ↗
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xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
totallymike · · focus · HN ↗
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waterTanuki · · focus · HN ↗
The bar for something like this should not be 100% accuracy. It should be 100% accountability and transparency, followed by being at least as accurate as google search.
Similar to autonomous driving: it doesn't need to be perfect, just less likely than humans are at causing an accident.
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
"Sometimes computers just make shit up now but that's OK because humans do to and if they do we can just sue them" should not be acceptable.
waterTanuki · · focus · HN ↗
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
waterTanuki · · focus · HN ↗
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
That isn't how LLMs work. LLMs are statistical language models, not search engines[0,1]. They can be prompted to call external software to search databases, but they themselves are not capable of doing so, and more often than not they generate responses based on their own model, which may not be accurate. We've had technology that was capable of searching databases for decades without the quirk of not being capable of presenting that information accurately.
>Are you saying LLM's are not suited for searching through text?
I am saying that first and foremost they don't do that and furthermore that they are less suited as a substitute for that than what we had before. An obvious example of this is the AI feature of Google Search, which I've seen hallucinate results numerous times. But you can also look up the numerous times AI has fabricated citations when used in scientific research.
[0]<a href="https://medium.com/@himadri.abm/large-language-models-are-not-search-engines-ed262b70425a" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@himadri.abm/large-language-models-are-no...
[1]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40814536">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40814536
austinthetaco · · focus · HN ↗
iamnothere · · focus · HN ↗
My local county government has a pretty good website, but even then it’s completely overwhelming if you try to find something off the happy path of the most common services/tasks. I can’t imagine the nightmare of trying to organize a federal portal manually and keep it up to date. Plain search isn’t sufficient because there are so many overlapping functions that are just slightly different.
I hate to say it, but this is one area that an LLM assistant actually makes sense. Maybe it needs a second validation pass with routing to a human assistant if it can’t figure out how to give an accurate answer to a query.
everforward · · focus · HN ↗
Doesn't really have any bearing on a similar system for HR. The government is sort of unique in a bunch of ways, but not really being responsible for what their low level agents say is one of them.
I'm not sure how to fix that, to be honest. I'm also not sure how much worse it is than trying to Google it? Google is full of stuff that's either wrong, or won't apply for a reason that takes some reading comprehension to grasp (e.g. state-specific rules/programs/etc).
idontwantthis · · focus · HN ↗
ceroxylon · · focus · HN ↗
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
jpcfl · · focus · HN ↗
Compare this with the benchmark.
Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.
mitchellst · · focus · HN ↗
There's a ton of hearsay and rumor about how the US Government works, even among educated/sophisticated people who are dextrous with bureaucracy. The problem gets much worse as you go down the educational ladder, which is most of the US population.
The Perfect, please meet The Good. You are not enemies.
dxdm · · focus · HN ↗
jpcfl · · focus · HN ↗
If you're really curious, I want to get a Type-86 tasting license for my store. The ABC site[1] says my kind of store (<5000sqft) is "generally" not qualified, which makes it sound like there are exceptions (spoiler: there are).
The first agent told me that the license is not an add-on, meaning I'd have to complete a very long process to obtain the license. This was wrong. It's an add-on.
The second agent told me that I was not eligible because I have less than 5000sqft of space. Not true (see below).
The third told my wife that 75% of the items in our store need to be alcoholic beverages to qualify. Wrong again.
I finally asked my legal LLM, which pointed me to the statute, which says, "Type-86 ... can be issued to businesses which also hold off-sale retail licenses [that] earn at least 75 percent of their total gross sales from the sale of alcoholic beverages." Ultimately, it comes down to how ABC interprets and enforces this law, so I really expected to get some clarity from them rather than complete falsities.
[1]: <a href="https://www.abc.ca.gov/instructional-tasting-license-for-off-sale-licensees/" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.ca.gov/instructional-tasting-license-for-off...
AlfeG · · focus · HN ↗
dr_dshiv · · focus · HN ↗
crimsoneer · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/16/5-things-we-learned-testing-gov-uk-chat-an-ai-assistant-for-government/" rel="nofollow">https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/16/5-things-we-learn...
aprentic · · focus · HN ↗
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shin_lao · · focus · HN ↗
LogicalRisk · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
schainks · · focus · HN ↗
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eli · · focus · HN ↗
hungryhobbit · · focus · HN ↗
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tyrabound · · focus · HN ↗
That being said, I’m aware of a vulnerability in that regard of it is attending to guardrail answers to the .gov and .mil domains.
bonkersbonkersb · · focus · HN ↗
thenayr · · focus · HN ↗
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GolfPopper · · focus · HN ↗
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ShinyLeftPad · · focus · HN ↗
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ncr100 · · focus · HN ↗
tombert · · focus · HN ↗
ryanmcbride · · focus · HN ↗
how many felonies has the president of the united states been charged with?
>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope
has biden ever been convicted of a crime?
>I did not find official records of a criminal conviction for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
>Official sources in this search discuss other matters (for example, a pardon for Robert Hunter Biden), not a conviction of Joseph R. Biden Jr. I cannot independently confirm a complete nationwide criminal-history search from these pages
>[Link to Department of Justice Pardon warrant (Hunter Biden)]
has any other president ever been convicted of a crime?
>Yes. A Congressional Research Service brief reports that on May 30, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree
Funny that it would only talk about trump's convictions after bringing up hunter biden.
groundzeros2015 · · focus · HN ↗
Retric · · focus · HN ↗
That it was specifically engineered to give that response. Thus political pressure was applied to the design.
The funny bit was just humorous. There’s likely many ways to get that same information without referencing Biden.
avgDev · · focus · HN ↗
mjmsmith · · focus · HN ↗
We know, we know.
latexr · · focus · HN ↗
So the cutoff date was somewhere around mid-2024?
thesmtsolver2 · · focus · HN ↗
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jedbrooke · · focus · HN ↗
I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.
Dwedit · · focus · HN ↗
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
maherbeg · · focus · HN ↗
zephyreon · · focus · HN ↗
I’m currently doing a deep dive on Rampart, their (allegedly) local PII filter.
electriclove · · focus · HN ↗
sippingabonedry · · focus · HN ↗
Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
adfghiono9i · · focus · HN ↗
The main lesson learned was that it was ineffective to rely entirely on outsourcing. The government needs top-notch engineering talent in-house. This led to the creation of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a fantastic group of people which did some of the best web design and engineering on the planet.
<a href="https://www.usds.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usds.gov/
Trump killed them, of course, and the website is now entitled "United States DOGE Service". I hope that, some day, I will no longer be embarrassed to be an American.
r_lee · · focus · HN ↗
adfghiono9i · · focus · HN ↗
Seriously, just look at this crap. Fonts so large they become hard to read blurring into existence as I scroll, giant autoplaying video chewing up my bandwidth and CPU, giant useless pictures, a "food pyramid" even harder to read than the one from the '90s, low-contrast colors, not a citation in sight, one picture too small to read that can be expanded by clicking on it with no indication of this interaction, and it looks nothing like any other government website in existence. The total page weight is over 30 megs. Worthless at conveying information, but it looks capital-M Modern (and gives me a capital-M Migraine).
<a href="https://realfood.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://realfood.gov/
<a href="https://wave.webaim.org/report#/realfood.gov" rel="nofollow">https://wave.webaim.org/report#/realfood.gov
(The information is crap, too, but you already knew that.)
GSA's work was mainly done by 18F. Which was also destroyed by Musk and pals at the same time they destroyed USDS.
What made USDS (and 18F) special was not merely having web developers in the executive branch. It was that they were among the best in the world, and drove standardization and improvement across the entire government. Now we've got AI bros with buckets of eye-catching (eye-melting) slop.
ArizonaJoe · · focus · HN ↗
brettermeier · · focus · HN ↗
tancop · · focus · HN ↗
Clarity is important for things like filing your taxes or applying for a visa, and even then you don't need a boring design to do the job. All it takes is serious amounts of UX testing done by someone with real experience.
adfghiono9i · · focus · HN ↗
But that's kind of irrelevant. This is a government website. A >30 MiB download; poor support for reader mode, custom CSS, or screen readers; excessive animation; and low contrast are all objectively poor for accessibility. This is why the people in 18F and USDS made websites that look different from private industry: the goal is to provide essential services and information to everyone, not to make a real impression on the subset of the population that can use the site.
seemaze · · focus · HN ↗
What on earth gave you that idea? This admin has made it very plain whom they serve and who must serve them.
tencentshill · · focus · HN ↗
zeroonetwothree · · focus · HN ↗
Garshtrot · · focus · HN ↗
doc_ick · · focus · HN ↗
why_at · · focus · HN ↗
The first suggestion I saw was "I just got married, how do I change my last name?"
It tells you to update your Social Security info first and gives you some helpful links.
ChatGPT tells me the same things with some of the same links. It didn't even have to ask if I was in America because it found my state based off my IP I assume.
cousinbryce · · focus · HN ↗
nxobject · · focus · HN ↗
m348e912 · · focus · HN ↗
Levitating · · focus · HN ↗
why_at · · focus · HN ↗
On the other hand this is just going through one or more of the big AI companies anyway. So they still get data from users, now we're just funding them with our taxes instead of using one of many LLM interfaces available for free.
The privacy policy actually looks OK though, I'll be interested to see what the EFF has to say.
nightski · · focus · HN ↗
jonhohle · · focus · HN ↗
tyrabound · · focus · HN ↗
It’s likely just a mask of either ChatGPT and probably through some massively bloated, nepotistic federal contract. There may be some additional guidelines and instructions but it’s probably not RAG on anything that isn’t publicly slay accessible to any other model, even if it is hard limited to federal sites/domains.
In addition to what others have said, ChatGPT is also available free and without an account I believe. What are you more likely to think of when you have a question, your AI service you already use and have your information in and maybe even has access to your documents, or are you going to remember to go to America.gov for basic chat AI?
Frankly, it would be really interesting to benchmark it against the other models when it comes to accomplishing things related to the government, i.e. Which information is more accurate, useful, and actionable.
There’s also another matter I find a bit troubling depending on the nature of how this came about, it could also be something that creates an inextricable incumbency in whichever AI company is behind it, i.e., how Microsoft has become a kind of parasite on government and thereby on corporations for many decades now.
dzhiurgis · · focus · HN ↗
Good luck making it apolitical
doc_ick · · focus · HN ↗
ShinyLeftPad · · focus · HN ↗
2. US won't run their own local model they simply use one of the three who's the coziest with the government paying it $$$ and user data. And there was no request for proposals or public tender.
bhelkey · · focus · HN ↗
From the privacy policy[1], "Our AI providers operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements and retain none of your prompts or the responses they generate. America.gov’s own response cache is separate and is described in Section 5.
Our AI providers are contractually prohibited from selling your information, building an advertising profile, or training their AI models with your data."
[1] <a href="https://america.gov/privacy-policy" rel="nofollow">https://america.gov/privacy-policy
ShinyLeftPad · · focus · HN ↗
gabbagool · · focus · HN ↗
Edit: Nevermind, someone made this point already.
shusaku · · focus · HN ↗
bee_rider · · focus · HN ↗
oridb · · focus · HN ↗
SpicyLemonZest · · focus · HN ↗
I can't help but notice, for example, that the system prompt is not public information.
AzzyHN · · focus · HN ↗
el_blargos · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe the federal government could use some of its powers to prevent literal phishing and scam sites from showing up in the advertising for the first, top listed results from search engines when non-technical boomers (or technical knowledge equivalent of) search for certain basic services. It seems there's very little actual evaluation by the ad-serving-entities of whether the destination of an ad is a legitimate thing these days.
mplewis · · focus · HN ↗
mcintyre1994 · · focus · HN ↗
They probably need to teach it the keyword though, I started with “ESTA” and it replied to me in Spanish telling me to ask it a question :)
okgreat111 · · focus · HN ↗
Rebuff5007 · · focus · HN ↗
I know some companies that at a high level want to "organize the world's information" or "build the future of human connection", yet have done innumerable cruel and harmful things to society (at least in my opinion).
dbbk · · focus · HN ↗
kijashdkujdfhas · · focus · HN ↗
delfinom · · focus · HN ↗
radicalbyte · · focus · HN ↗
And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.
jryle70 · · focus · HN ↗
kijashdkujdfhas · · focus · HN ↗
Did you look at usa.gov at all?
jryle70 · · focus · HN ↗
mcmcmc · · focus · HN ↗
shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
mcmcmc · · focus · HN ↗
goodmythical · · focus · HN ↗
It is less effort and requires less time than america.gov's:
Type "find affordable housing near me", wait praying for relevant results, recieve irrelevant results due to my rural isp having flaky geoip, told to click on the same link I already got grom usa.gov or one of three other irrelevant links or call this irrelevant phone number.
So my tax dollars are now funding a worse way to get worse results to people who can't use a well formatted site that they won't benefit from because they'll trust it implicitly despite it being demonstrably less reliable.
Brilliant.
iamnothere · · focus · HN ↗
A few queries that I couldn’t find answers to through that site:
* How can you get a permit for a group event in a national forest?
* How can I become a federal contractor as a small business?
* Where do I go to get an amateur radio license and what are the steps involved?
* What are the requirements for purchasing tribal land?
Basically usa.gov seems to mainly exist for people following the “happy path”—go to school, get a job or run a simple business, get health insurance, buy a house, retire. It’s got a few exceptions for large minority groups. But the issue is that the total number of people deviating from that path is huge, even if they only need to find one thing that’s not on the path. Right now they rely on commercial search to get answers, which often leads them to scam sites or intermediaries who take a cut for filing paperwork.
verst · · focus · HN ↗
trentor · · focus · HN ↗
fakedang · · focus · HN ↗
expedition32 · · focus · HN ↗
It's rijksoverheid.nl in my country- good luck to any poor expat trying to pronounce that lol.
mikepurvis · · focus · HN ↗
Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.
misanthropemigh · · focus · HN ↗
I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.
Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.
Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.
I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.
Steppphennn · · focus · HN ↗
dwattttt · · focus · HN ↗
Sure. It's possible. But is your point that it's happening here? Or just that something wrong could happen?
IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
I believe it could be used for good things, bad things, or a bit of both. I passionately believe this!
shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
A terrorist finds it much easier to execute on insidious plans if the world's information on vulnerabilities and weapons are organized at their fingertips, for example.
dansquizsoft · · focus · HN ↗
Garshtrot · · focus · HN ↗
shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
zachthewf · · focus · HN ↗
fakedang · · focus · HN ↗
wredcoll · · focus · HN ↗
There is a big difference between "these ads have flashing lights and take up half the screen and are annoying" and "this ad is attempting to defraud you".
HackerThemAll · · focus · HN ↗
As long as your law allows it, it's not Google's liability. Just change the law. But you call regulations "communism".
fakedang · · focus · HN ↗
i_love_retros · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelopt-googles-ai-collaboration-with-israels-military-sparks-controversy-amid-conflict/#:~:text=In%20January%202025%2C,Ministry%20and%20IDF." rel="nofollow">https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelop...
Google turned android into a personal data harvester and advertising machine
LightBug1 · · focus · HN ↗
dansquizsoft · · focus · HN ↗
hammock · · focus · HN ↗
Forgeties79 · · focus · HN ↗
randomburner193 · · focus · HN ↗
whoiskazar · · focus · HN ↗
lkbm · · focus · HN ↗
Law exists the way it does for a lot of reasons. It's not a government make-work program.
sloptit · · focus · HN ↗
wredcoll · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, governmental corruption happens.
No that is not the majority or even common case.
If you remove the power from the federal government, where does it go?
moopie · · focus · HN ↗
cr0nn · · focus · HN ↗