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.
> 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.
maherbeg · · focus · HN ↗
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.
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 ↗
joemazerino · · focus · HN ↗
andrewflnr · · focus · HN ↗
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.