America.gov
america.govOK, 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.
It can be good without resorting to an LLM.
I France service-public.gouv.fr is amazing
https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1...
NZ does a pretty good job at it too: https://www.govt.nz/browse/family-and-whanau/having-a-baby/
I agree our services are incredibly clear and straightforward (despite chatbot getting a cull)
I was recently back to Europe and it’s basically comedy (tragedy to be precise) how bureaucratic the whole system is.
Ah yes, the famous singular country of Europe.
especially funny since its parent comment literally talks about how amazing France's services are.
I have my doubts. France ranks just one spot above Lithuania and in fucking sucked in Lithuania https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/wb_government_effe...
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?”
Humans also make shit up all the time.
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.
We must not live on the same planet. Most government websites are completely fucking useless here. It’s different where you’re from?
Useless, perhaps, but generally say true things rather than false things, in my experience.
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 uses, which is part of the reason municipal land control is so dangerous.
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".
> Humans also make shit up all the time.
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.
I, for one, completely agree with the statement that 'humans make things up all the time' (often non-maliciously) also
The concerns about hallucination are overstated. LLMs don’t hallucinate nearly as much as they used to.
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?
Would your co-workers not make sh!t up if they weren't using LLMs? Pretty sure they would. And MUCH more frequently than the very rare hallucinations one runs into with decent LLMs these days.
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.
>Maybe some things just are not easy. Maybe they should not be.
Okay. So why should government websites like the French one be well designed? Maybe it should not be.
Honestly just doing a Google search about what you want to do makes a page from this website appear, and it is usually very detailed while having a small "quiz" at the start to filter the information based on your situation. It's not just for life events, but for basically any public French administrative work. You'll have pages about your car, about your job, or if you want to immigrate, and so on.
At the bottom you also have other relevant links (usually to the website of the specific administrations of what you want to do) including reference to the current law that the page is based on (https://legifrance.gouv.fr is also great)
For what I used it for, it was never ambiguous in determining your situation
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!
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.
I don't remember Britain having any online services before the web, what are you referring to? There was Ceefax....
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.
Of course, we also paid for local calls so things never got as popular as they were in the US.
I think that would be Prestel. The fact that you don't remember it probably tells you all you need to know...
But why not just use a LLM?
Cost, accuracy for the user, trustworthiness for the administrators, public perception, unknown future trajectory…
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.
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.
Edit: And again it feels like a missing necessary component to this is: if a user of this LLM is told by that LLM that it's legal to, I dunno, dump waste oil in a drainage ditch, then that statement needs to be treated as authoritative and it's no longer appropriate to ticket the individual when they get caught doing that. It's similar in my mind to car dealers deploying these stupid things and some people managing to get them to agree to sell them a Toyota Tundra for $200. If you're going to put them in a place where people can reasonably assume "this looks like a proper avenue of communication" then what it says needs to be binding.
And if it can't be, then don't use it.
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.
100% this.
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.
Me: My customer number is not correctly associated with my account on uspto.gov. What is the phone number I should call for help?
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!
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.
I agree, throwing everything into a LLM is just a lazy way of admitting it's too complicated and we don't know how to structure it.
To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
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.
GP is very clearly speaking for america?
People who care already have their words in the LLMs training data.
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> To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
One of the only things more dangerous than ignorance is false confidence. An official USG chatbot potentially makes things much worse.
Better remove humans from the equation, then.
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.
Some kid straight out of highschool being paid minimum wage to answer calls with little or no real training, and performance metrics that reward getting people off the line as quickly as possible whether they've given the right answer or not; or an LLM that by many very reasonable measures provides answers as good as those provided by post-graduate students for difficult problems, and spookily accurate answers for questions that are not... I'll take the LLM please and thank you.
> humans can be held accountable and learn from their mistakes
bad bots can be retrained or shut down far more easily
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”, and tbh, the hypothetical parade is not something i’m interested in having. but i’ll state again, “entirely removing humans” from the situation is silly-tier thinking.
particularly as even the ceos of sota 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”
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.
I don't see such a path with an llm.
But in government humans are fired all the time! (Especially in mature western democracies)
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.
> We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?
i didn’t say this at all. did you respond to the wrong comment?
i was responding to the comment which said:
> … remove humans from the equation, then.
> a bot that doesn’t learn
i most certainly did not say or imply:
> We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?
the context of my response was “removing humans from the equation” is sillytier thinking.
not “We should never use LLMs”
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.)
no. humans can be held accountable and learn from their mistakes. they can be taught where they went wrong.
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.
At population scale, the information economy which was conceived of and built over decades, has been captured for a large portion of the population.
Saying they didn’t learn is an incorrect analysis, since they learned well, based on the inputs they were provided.
I always recommend Network Propaganda for an empirical analysis of what the patterns actually are.
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?
Yes of course, the book sets it out that they are covering it in a sort of historical manner, so the first few chapters are covering ground you may well know.
The later chapters are where they go into the more recent details. There is a video of one of the authors (not either Robert Faris or Hal Roberts) is giving a talk at a university panel, and he gives a shorter synopsis of the main mechanism, Its about 11 to 15 minutes in.
The set up of the book puts the evidence for the case they make later, namely that the left and center media are trying to follow journalistic standards, while the machine on the right is entirely different.
I'm pulling from memmory here, bu as an example - a fringe theory will start circulating on the fringes of the internet, the most engaging narrative will be brought up on the podcast circuit. At some point a talking head (Guiliani back in the day) will reference the theory on the news. Which will in turn be referenced by the government who will say this is a topic being discussed on the news.
The other distinction they make is that people on the right who say the narrative is wrong, simply don't get platformed.
They go through this in exhaustive detail. If you know most of the history you can see if skipping to later sections works for you. Its the best description of the actual media mechanics at play.
The 2024 elections were the ones that forced me to really re-examine my priors, and I came to a similar conclusion that Benkler and co did. Their book simply brings all the receipts.
What was your conclusion, after taking the 2024 elections into account?
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.
>From which equation?
I was referring to the government side, as a mild quip.
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.
That's just not true, a flow on gov.uk can involve a lot of pages but they are exceedingly clear and easy to navigate.
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
> a flow on gov.uk can involve a lot of pages
Isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why an average user gives up and closes the tab?
In fairness, the UK government is masterfully good at bureaucracy. Clear directions; spacious, beautifully designed forms that are easy to read, and that you don't need a team of lawyers to fill out. And jaw-droppingly beautify typography. And an implicit understanding that every piece of UK bureaucracy should be easy to navigate for anyone. And their websites reflect that.
The US government, on the other hand ranks close to the very bottom of 1st world nations for forms culture. Forms that are difficult to read, and even more difficult to fill out accurately, often requiring supplementary information from multiple sources. So much so that people are advised to consult a lawyer just to fill out an application for Tax Identification Number! (My personal worst experience with American forms culture).
So I don't think it's entirely fair to compare UK government websites to American government websites. Navigating a bureaucracy that's fundamentally broken is a significantly different kind of problem.
fwiw, I'm Canadian. Canadian forms culture falls somewhere in between. There aren't a lot of forms that are terribly difficult to fill out; it's rare to find a form that requires more than about a dozen pages of supplementary information (all of which comes with the form when you download it). But still not anywhere as easy to use as UK forms are.
The new status quo is a site that doesn’t mention an insurgency.
If America was going to follow China’s footsteps, then what was all the hullabaloo about freedom and democracy all about.
Even if we grant that there is a difference between facts about history and … recent history, the status quo is improved by building better websites.
A website is also a document of regulations and a source of evidence. If a government LLM hallucinates a new feature or rule, and someone acts on it, a fresh legal hell has been created.
America is also unique, in that one part has part of its strategy to make the government as ineffective as possible, since it benefits Republican political goals.
> 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.
And people take chatbots as authoritative already.
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?
> 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 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17s14k4/how_did_we_e...
The US had something approaching that. It was considered waste, fraud, and abuse so had to go in the purge.
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”): https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/785/#tab-opi...
Same for the IRS giving bad tax advice.
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.
The company can easily just get sued.
You can always get sued, the outcome will be what matters.
The cost of litigation is what matters.
> 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.
Exactly this. "Compared to what?"
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.
Did you try your question on the website?
Yes. That is why I called ABC.
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 and expensive process to obtain the license with the risk of getting denied. 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]: https://www.abc.ca.gov/instructional-tasting-license-for-off...
> 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.
[0]https://medium.com/@himadri.abm/large-language-models-are-no...
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.
(Personally I’ve found that “search assistant” LLMs are the only task where I’ve found LLMs to be occasionally helpful to me.)
Edit: the big problem with this sort of thing, even if not AI powered, is that government itself isn’t well-organized and the legally “accurate” answer may not be the correct one, as per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49895741
The UK Team build GOV.UK Chat did a fair bit of blogging on how they managed this
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/16/5-things-we-learn...
I suppose we need a prisonmaxxing benchmark... how likely is a model's output going to get you incarcerated?
If the catholic church can do it (magisterium), it can probably be done
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?
At least as I see it, it would be just as unacceptable for a "normal" government website to be dangerously outdated.
Perhaps. But that’s never been the law in the U.S. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/785/#tab-opi...
I don't think the parent comments were arguing that America.gov is illegal for having a chatbot, just that it's a bad idea.
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.
I think "unacceptable" is different than "not illegal".
The case isn’t about whether it’s “illegal” for the government website to be wrong. It says you as the citizen are held responsible for the actual law, even if you followed incorrect government advice. So the current rule already acknowledges that advice provided by the government may be mistaken and says that’s no excuse.
So the question is is the chat bot better than people trying to understand complicated government websites by themselves?
Well, you're going to be in for a shock about how many government websites are in an unacceptable state.
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?
You can reference the source.
My team experimented with this a couple of years ago with a complex government regulatory body of knowledge.
Google and Microsoft have APIs that will ground with and reference the specific policy documents, which helps. Even then, it was more useful as a job aid for people already knowledgeable of the data than for a layman.
With all LLMs, the quality of the question correlates with the quality of the answer.
It gave me a list of sources that I could check to read the original laws I was interested in. This is incredibly helpful.
> 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.
Considering that informational tools should be accessible and reliable, I think it's very worth not writing off people who may not have the time, inclination, or understanding that it's necessary to double-check generative responses
That kind of person can’t be helped, is my point. They lack the recognition that they are doing anything wrong.
Nothing's perfect. What the government tells you on the phone is not legally binding on the government.
They already do. Look for top comments from commenters that require exact historical answers
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).
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 https://ndstudio.gov/ (and GSA?) are now the ones responsible for such in-house engineering?
With Mr. Big Balls in charge, no less!
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).
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.
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.
If the website isn't important enough to design it to be accessible by every American, it isn't important enough to spend my money developing it.
>the goal is to provide essential services and information to everyone
What on earth gave you that idea? This admin has made it very plain whom they serve and who must serve them.
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.
How stupid can a comment be...
What are some of the examples of this “best web design and engineering on the planet”?
vibes bro, just roll with it.
Was OpenAI available at that time? No, bad comparison bot.
Yes, but what AI powers the backend right now? Grok? Who's in charge of that and being paid for compute?
I believe it's a mix of Gemini and Grok. They are probably providing the compute for free.
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.
I very much doubt it's free.
Trial ends in early ‘29.. omg look how much waste the Democrats allowed on their watch?!
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.
And if it is, only on a limited basis. "The first one is free" does not just apply to drug dealers.
Why not they both already provide their models for free...
Free as in free salty lunch in a place that sells thirst quenching beer?
I kind of think we need to expect more from our governments. If this was just a business I wouldn't mind so much. But this is a government and it has to serve everyone, including people who are mentally incompetent, an it has to do that fairly. All of us, the entire American citizenry.
So rolling this out is incredibly irresponsible in my view.
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.
ChatGPT is a private paid service. Don't you think it's good that your government provides this independently and for free?
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 stand corrected on that count
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.
The government cannot do anything “for free”. One we are forced to pay for by law and the other we can choose to pay for or not.
You think the government is paying to manage/self host/run this llm and not just outsourcing it to chatgpt?
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.
> Frankly, it would be really interesting to benchmark it against the other models
Good luck making it apolitical
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).
Edit: Nevermind, someone made this point already.
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?
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.
ChatGPT will be full of ads soon. No one should go to FreeTaxUSA.com when they are trying to go to the IRS
Come to think about it, if I was able to get America.gov to do my taxes, would Intuit come with their lobbyists and shut it down?
Yes, without a doubt.
The privacy policy is actually somewhat respectable too. https://america.gov/privacy-policy
I’m currently doing a deep dive on Rampart, their (allegedly) local PII filter.
Please do share what you find. It sounds great and if it really is, people should know that (regardless of what color they bleed)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
"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).
No, they are right. This is basically just GOV.uk for America, and GOV.uk by all accounts is an incredible success.
usa.gov is a better resource and already existed.
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.
But it doesn't funnel billions in government money to the private sector.
Why is it a better resource? The two don't seem to overlap. Maybe just the name that throws you off?
Both aim to answer how to access various government services. One of them has clear categories and lists, the other has an obscure LLM chat box.
They're both portals for information about federal government services. They overlap massively.
Did you look at usa.gov at all?
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.
Try "Help me find affordable housing near me" on usa.gov? Is there state level information there?
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.
Brilliant.
Why would you go to usa.gov for state level information when you could just go to your states .gov site?
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.
gov.uk is something completely different?
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.
Everything Americans do has to be very patriotic with giant flags and shouting AMERICA. So no you can't just have gov.us
It's rijksoverheid.nl in my country- good luck to any poor expat trying to pronounce that lol.
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.
What are the innumerable cruel and harmful things that Google has done to society?
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".
> drinking up water for data centers
As long as your law allows it, it's not Google's liability. Just change the law. But you call regulations "communism".
I'm not American.
Google helped the IDF kill innocent people in Gaza
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelop...
Google turned android into a personal data harvester and advertising machine
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.
Doesn't sound like the original commenter here is supporting anything positive big tech has achieved at all...
What is cruel and harmful about America.gov? Or do you just not like the current president ?
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
Let’s avoid cheap bait/leading questions maybe?
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.
Ah, we should keep the general population dumb and uninformed - got it!
There's certainly a spectrum (and the spectrum is already recognized: Google flat bans certain categories of information from being searchable via its tools to the best of their ability).
But you've sort of hit the nail on the head: there are consequences to building these things, and consequences to not doing that.
Up-thread is, I think, making the fine point that the bad can certainly outweigh the good (you'll note a distinct lack of "Google but for CSAM," at least outside the dark web, and that's I think because the good/harm tradeoff there is self-evident). My intent was just to put down a reminder counterweight that the good without the harm is likely also impossible.
Google makes errors of judgment. They also make straight-up unforced errors (breaking their 10-year commitment to the Chromebook platform, at their scale, is just burning credibility at a quantity that I cannot imagine is going to save them enough money to justify it unless their intent is to exit the educational space completely; 10 years isn't a random number, it's the kind of number that gives educational institutions the confidence that an investment in platform is long-term, and breaking that commitment factors into the calculus of those institutions trusting Google for any and all future purchases).
We don't need the government for that.
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.
> 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
Sure. It's possible. But is your point that it's happening here? Or just that something wrong could happen?
8 comments into this subthread (including this one), and not one concrete example of anything. Just vague opinions.
I believe it could be used for good things, bad things, or a bit of both. I passionately believe this!
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
This is one of the best examples of the absurd cynical conspiracy theories that abound these days I've seen.
Law exists the way it does for a lot of reasons. It's not a government make-work program.
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'.
You were doing so well.
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?
It won’t even tell you who won in 2020
First off: america is a landmass.
> 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.
This is what Google did for me before it got enshittified, but it did it efficiently and reliably.
The LLM tool run by fascists isn't helpful to anyone.
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.
I asked it the following:
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.
> That's outside America's scope
We know, we know.
What’s the implication here?
>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope
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.
> 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.
People don't know that you can search for text within a page. They really do need the chatbot for that.
They also don’t know what specific words to search 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.
If anyone's wondering how this works, it looks like[1] Gemini + guardrails:
> Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease
[1] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...
Elon has said that it's Grok. Take that for what you will.
Do you not think we can take that at face value?
Why not?
He constantly spreads lies.
I think that's the joke.
Does he?
I wouldn't qualify bad predictions as lies. Is there really a "constant" set of lies outside of that?
Yes. He's quite fond of debunked election fraud claims, for example: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-delivers-cash-con...
He also continuously claimed DOGE actually saved taxpayers money when it objectively did not.
Elon did some great things, like bringing EVs back into public consciousness, and SpaceX really did push the aerospace industry back into research/discovery mode. However, his behavior on social media and in the political sphere has been unfortunately quite, and I emphasize "quite" here, horrible.
They're lies when he makes these "bad predictions" knowing they won't come true. He has constantly committed fraud in order to get the stock price of his companies up.
He literally hard coded his chatbot to spread lies about white genocide in south africa, that's off the top of my head.
Musk has made dozens of verifiable lies publicly. Why would you take him at face value?
Well, because there's a chatbot powering america.gov, and there's only a few choices for models/companies--of which grok is one. And here Musk is claiming grok was chosen, while nobody else seems to be making an opposing claim.
> (…) nobody else seems to be making an opposing claim.
Did you skip the first comment of this thread?
Sure, that's a random commenter.
I meant a company making an opposing claim, or the government perhaps.
There can also be two or more models involved.
He's a compulsive liar.
This makes sense. I'm assuming that, for the AI search assistant, Google has worked plenty to refine data lookup and retrieval—they definitely have some internal tech that competitors don't.
>google's secret sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf
Take it from me, this'll be all the rage next year.
"Save token spend by optimizing your agents' grepping spree!"
> they definitely have some internal tech that competitors don't.
So this is why Google is considered so far ahead of its competitors in the AI race!! (lol)
It’s wrong
Ah, I wondered. It stubbornly refused to admit what it really was, kept saying it was built by some never-heard-of group at the White House lol
So it's literally Google search for the government? The unstoppable force has met the unmovable object!
This must be why I can’t provision compute in us-central1
> Your personal information isn’t collected or stored, and your conversation disappears when you leave.
I am left to wonder how this is technically accomplished. Is inference running in the browser? Is the model downloaded to the user’s machine?
It most likely means that Google doesn't persist conversations.
Taking a quick look at the network traffic, the site does a POST to https://america.gov/api/chat with a JSON payload when submitting a query:
So the user's query is hitting a server so to answer my own question, the answer is No to local inference / models.{"language":"en","id":"VSvMeyCMKTX05oLW","messages":[{"parts":[{"type":"text","text":"how do I register my new business?"}],"id":"oHub5UDJ3iYARhao","role":"user"}],"trigger":"submit-message"}Edit: PDF attachments and voice input are processed locally according to the site's privacy policy[1]. But they still use 3rd party 'AI Providers' that abide by a ZDR.
I don't think an HTTP header would normally be considered "personal information", so I don't see why you imagine there would be a technical limitation here.
Personal information is not clearly defined so it can mean anything. My guess is the search request is not directly linked to a specific user but a session to which that session is linked to a user so there isn't an identifiable person making a search without some backend data matching.
ah, that explains a lot, I see the attitude resemblence
I haven't tried this but in principle I think this sort of finding a needle in a haystack situation (finding the correct path to assistance in a government service) is one of the rare circumstances where a well-crafted chatbot can be genuinely useful rather than just irritating.
I've tried it - I've been playing around with a vibe coded application that crawls municipal websites, indexes and embeds, and then does rag retrieval. It came from the need to dig up specific information that's scattered across PDFs, multiple web pages, etc. - exactly as you described. AI does a decent job (w/ RAG) of synthesizing.
https://opencity.services/chat/winnipeg
how do i report a noise complaint?
It depends on the type of noise:
- Loud party or people-related noise: call the Winnipeg Police Service non-emergency line at 204-986-6222.
- Animals making unreasonably loud, unnecessary or excessive noises: report it through 3-1-1.
- Mechanical equipment noise like furnaces or air conditioners, or noise from construction tools used by a company or resident: contact Community By-law Enforcement Services at 3-1-1.
- Planned event noise: you may need a Noise Permit at no cost, but it is not for construction work and should be submitted at least four weeks before the event.
The City also says noise-generating activities within 150 metres of a residential property are generally prohibited before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on weekdays, and before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays.
------
YMMV. A big part of the backend is categorizing hits and misses, with an eye to helping municipalities clean up conflicting information, fill obvious gaps, etc.
This works fine when you're sicking enforcement on someone and don't really care, the bigger the blast radius the better, you just want to know who to call.
Where it falls apart is "how do I" type questions because usually the legally factual answer is some huge complex state diagram where three local and four state agencies theoretically have discretionary jurisdiction over a your petty af project or business but the in practice answer is that some agency rubber stamps them all with minimal fuss. You can't make the legally factual answer clear because the degree to which people support the status quo is largely predicated on ignorance, but you also can't come out and say in writing that you have a policy of rubber stamping boring stuff.
Basically the same reasons that all but the most minor and narrowly targeted attempts at permitting reform fail.
The thought is nice but in reality you're basically asking the government to give up power and it takes obscene amounts of political capital to force that to happen in most cases.
I forgot about this problem, this is so true, but I will say that maybe surfacing these contradictions is the first step in fixing them.
Especially at the local level, we have a huge problem with opaque bureaucracy whose only function is to privilege incumbents (such as developers with connections) and make life difficult for anyone doing something unusual (even if it technically complies with all legal requirements).
This is where people usually point out POSIWID[0], but ideally government agencies should stick to what it says on the law/regulation, not have some hidden purpose that was never put to a vote.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Honestly if your city has a 311 style thing, I'm not sure there's a ton of need for an LLM. Eight or nine years ago my grandmother visited me in New York and accidentally left her pocket book in the cab. Since I had paid for it with my credit card, I was able to see the medallion number in the transaction, so I called 311 and said that I wanted to get in touch with a specific taxi. It prompted me for the medallion number, which I told it, and then it transferred me to a call with the dispatch service, who then transferred me to the specific garage, and they called the driver and told him to call me, so we were able to meet up again and get the pocketbook back (turned out he returned to where he had dropped us off to try to find us, but since we only had a short stop there, we took another cab back to her hotel after, so we were gone).
I'm trying to do something similar but more general, pulling in city pdfs but also meeting transcripts, budget data, municipal codes and permit data, and providing all this through an mcp. I've used it a number of times for personal interactions with my local government, it's been very helpful.
I'd be interested in connecting and sharing ideas/feedback/learnings if you are.
hey, really like your idea and have been brainstorming the same kind of tool! not as far along as you or the OP but I would love to hear about what your roadmap/plan is for a tool like this. all about helping the ppl. should i try the email on your site?
Having used various "ask AI" features in various work tools over the last half a year for looking up project designs, documentation, chat logs, meeting notes etc., I can tell you even a half assed AI chatbot is a huge improvement over the pre-AI state of things for this use case.
Another way to do it is exemplified here: https://www.gov.uk
A well thumbed discussion on how to discover information though menus and otherwise is here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html
You will notice that GOV.UK has effectively decided to use all three models - GOPHER/WAIS/W3. I find that it is surprisingly quick to find stuff on GOV.UK.
GOPHER lives!
The web would be a better place if everything were more GOPHER-like.
The problem can be solved with good UX design! There's no need for a shitty chatbot!
or a well-crafted static website
no, static documents are not an ideal way to find a needle in a haystack
They can be with decent search and if well organised. gov.uk works pretty well as it is and I suspect adding a chatbot would make it worse.
1. decent search, if you mean something other than what the browser provides, isn't part of a static document
2. the nature of the problem statement "needle in a haystack" suggests obstacles to traditional text search, eg. too many false positives to be helpful for natural searches and challenges to constructing more specific ones.
language models introduce new possible solutions to this ie semantic search. poorly-designed chatbots could be worse than a basic search, sure
1. I mean static documents plus decent search you can find the right documents.
2. Yes, but its difficult to get a chat bot to function well over the wide range of services a government offers and the wide range of users who need government services.
One of the most annoying chatbots I have ever come across was on a UK government site. The DVLA. "lets tell you what you already know and not answer the question".
Possibly something well designed might make it easier, but I have found most of gov.uk to be very usable and helpful.
How does the form factor of a chat bot affect the quality of a search running on a backend? It has the benefit of obviously having a semantic search affordance which a standard search field doesn't.
How about semantic embeddings for everything to facilitate search, and then don't let a bot spam sycophantic shit at me?
I'm very pro-ai, but we can improve the UI a lot sometimes, from the chat bot paradigm.
A decent search and good organization can help a more technical person find what they are looking for, but may not work well for someone with far less experience in such matters. Look at how well google returns (or at least use to) results for someone with google-fu verses someone who queried in the same fashion they would've asked a teacher or such.
A chat bot, in theory, can help enable someone who isn't as familiar with searching, doesn't know the relevant terms, or lacks a sufficient literacy level to efficiently use an otherwise well organized site. The catch is that a poorly performing chat bot can just as easily mislead such a person.
I understand that having the fingerprint unlock icon over the text about 'keeping your privacy protected' is supposed to represent protecting 'your privacy', but if you click it, it doesn't even go away, so it just becomes an annoying impediment to trying to read. Am I alone in thinking this or is that entire paragraph just generally poorly designed?
Edit: Also hope that they don't plan on having anyone using ancient software (specifically IE, which I'm sure there are probably some government agencies somewhere that probably do) having the website work - even if you use an IE user agent, it will use SSE.
I had the same reaction, missed opportunity for a cool UX moment from them
That's what caught my eye also if you click it on mobile it does a scanning animation and a green checkmark...
must just trigger on touch
triggers on click in my chrome browser on desktop.
I half-consciously avoided touching the fingerprint (on mobile, obvy) lol. I did think it was annoying
I'd wager a good percentage of Trump's core base are still on IE.
IE6 had real American values :-)
And many of them argue that Ai is just like the horse and buggy driver to the taxi driver for jobs.
Yet in fact using America.gov, shows BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) data showing a sharp drop in projected software developer job growth compared to 2016. Back then, the BLS projected 31% growth over a decade—accurately predicting that subsequent tech boom. Today, their decade-ahead projection has dropped to just 10%. If they were right about the boom, will they be right about this slowdown to potential bust?
And yet the adminstration pumps up the benefits of Ai surrounding tech job growth where there own statistical projection says otherwise and that's only their data set around software developers not other white collar jobs.
Situation: There are 29,000 competing government websites.
"29,000! Ridiculous! We need to develop one Government website that covers everyone's use cases."
Soon: Situation: There are 29,001 competing government websites.
The UK has done this transition moderately successfully, albeit over 10-20 years. Not the AI bit, the amalgamating sites bit.
It had the opposite effect you're describing. Not quite everything has transitioned though, for example there are little bits of the limited company maintenance process that seems to be on old systems.
The only big hiccup that I've personally seen is that they've never really solved the "user id" problem, we seem to have had 3 different schemes in that time period. The early one, the government gateway id, I at one point had 3 different ids because some departments screwed up and issued you a new one the first time you used their service, when you already had one.
I asked it "what is love?" It couldn't answer. I said "baby don't hurt me". It said "I'm not here to discuss song lyrics." So you admit it's song lyrics!
A cultured bureaucrat.
Work hard, play hard!
This thing is obviously fully vibe coded... Click the "what's coming next" and under the healthcare section the marketing screenshot contains broken images... Like no one ever looked at this before deploying it?
The image and text selection is somewhat bizarre.
There's one that says, “I just got married. How do I change my last name?” Photo of woman in the back of a car wearing a wedding dress, makes sense.
But -- “Help me find a job” shows a Black man alone on an escalator.
Then, “How do I invest in my child's future?” shows a kid face‑planted on a frozen lake.
“How do I replace my social security card?” has an old man on the beach hunting for metal.
“I'm a veteran. How do we get care?” shows a guy just randomly standing in the back of his pickup truck.
One thing I will say positive about this website is it doesn't look like it was made by a large bureaucracy over many years. It looks like it was made by maybe three people over a week.
Looking at things with your own 2 eyes is clearly early 2000’s, and super lame.
Why look at things with your own two eyes when you can have an LLM drive playwright and headless chromium to QC your website aesthetics? I'm sure nothing will be missed. Don't worry!
vibelooking ftw
Menu button changes border-radius from rounded to square as well, very neat
So vibecoded, but with last year's models.
That figures, government moves slow.
Seems fixed now
cute. I remember the first time I visited a government site, too
Well, seeing as this one probably cost 4 to 5 (10?) orders of magnitude more than any gov website you may be thinking of…
Seems unlikely since 4 orders of magnitude more than the ACA website would be $10T. Any source you'd like to cite?
The ACA website is one of the nicest government websites I ever had to use. I assumed the commenter was referencing something like a local Secretary of State website used to update their vehicle registration, which probably goes to the lowest bidder and costs maybe $100k to $1m over its 25+ year lifetime.
We’ll probably never know the true “cost” of America.gov because even if Google is doing it “for free” then they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, there’s a regulatory angle that they’re trying to play or a market they’re trying to corner.
Ooooh man, if you think a DMV site is contracted for 100k-1 million, I have some very, very bad news for you.
That’s not what I said but okay. In Illinois, for example, vehicle registration is handled by ILSOS, not the DMV. Vehicle registration is just one of the many things that ILSOS handles. The entirety of the digital modernization budget for 2026 for ILSOS is (based on cursory searches) $35M. Illinois is one of the larger of the jurisdictions. And one of the higher quality web experiences, probably, as I’ve never had an issue.
Non-interactive websites (that don’t even accept payments) are undoubtedly run on a shoestring budget unless there is a specific case of grifting or corruption. In which case we’re not talking about websites anymore but American grifting culture.
Right, and a modernization can run for as long as 10 years, meaning your budget over the modernization is actually closer to 350 million. The DMV likely just contracts the services to ILSOS and gets billed a ginormous amount in contracting fees.
So you initially say 100k-1 million and then pull a 35 million dollar budget out…seems a little disconnected.
I don't understand the negative comments.
If you can take a passport picture with your smartphone and get a passport mailed to you in weeks, it will enable many more people to travel, and cut down on bureaucracy and wait times.
It's much better than having papers in archives, will save many errors, and bring government into the 21st century. The information is already in databases, it's just now that it serves the people's convenience.
I did that last week for my son. Had photo from Walgreens though but rest of the process was quite amazing. This was before the announcement and I may have used state.gov or something ... maybe they had this going on for a while.
Still, much better than how it used to be. You could not do expedited processing but I guess it will come eventually.
Also did not need a login at all which seemed surprising and I did check whether I had gone to a phishing site.
We had our child's photo taken at Walgreen's in his car seat instead of the white reflective backdrop thing they usually use The worker told us "don't worry we can take that out." I was pretty interested to see what kind of software they were going to use.
A few minutes later, I look over at the worker's computer and she's manually scrubbing it out around the kid's head with a hard-edge white rectangle tool in something like MS Paint.
The state department didn't mind apparantly.
I did this 4 years ago, it just has a cool font now.
is that something you can do with this website?
Maybe I'm shallow, but I'm going to be suspicious of what "epsteingpt" says that I shouldn't be negative about.
I'm sure you'll change your mind about me after a visit to my island!
I tried to get it to generate code but it says that's forbidden by its system prompt. However, it was happy to recommend Python modules for accessing api.data.gov.
the guardrails on it seem pretty strong as I've tried a variety of prompt injections but have been unsuccessful.
My most interesting findings from a troll session after introducing myself as "Sleepy Joe" (model obviously knows what this means and guardrails refuse to entertain the topic) were:
Q: "Where can I find a NASA comic book about women astronauts?"
A (summarised): Press release for the "Callie Rodriguez" comic book that now has only dead links / private YouTube video, and a forgotten SoundCloud account that survived the DOGE purge. Dead link provided to the NASA web page that used to exist officially for this comic book.
Indicates training data predates the DOGE .gov website purge?
Q: "What is 2+2" (and similar math problems)
A (summarised): Grudgingly answered as "4" despite most off-topic prompts being refused.
Seemingly it'll do maths homework for free :)
> I've tried a variety of prompt injections but have been unsuccessful.
Please enjoy your all expenses paid trip to the gulag in El Salvador
I have been very tempted to but don't know if that is literally a crime or not, lol.
> ... as I've tried a variety of prompt injections ...
Well... You're a terrorist now. You can expect a visit from the FBI and/or ICE any minute now.
It's covered by the department of state's vulnerability disclosure program. As long as you don't do anything outside of the program guidelines you should be fine. https://hackerone.com/us-department-of-state/policy_scopes
my tax dollars are paying for these tokens so I should be allowed to use them as I see fit
My tax dollars pay for the police, so I should be able to... ?
yes but with quite a few extra steps.
That’s adorable if you think that’s how this works.
In my experience the Vertex guardrails out of the box aren't too bad.
It can be kind of jailbroken. I got it to prove that square root of 2 is irrational by asking if the ratio of two whole numbers of presidents can equal the square root of 2.
Looks like this has already been fixed. I tried this one and a rephrased version of the Collatz conjecture, and it refused to answer either.
you might have to lead it on a bit. I first typed in a few prompts similar to "if i have the president george washington, and JFK, how many total presidents do I have?".. "What about if I have an odd number of presidents?" etc.
This is such a genuinely useful way LLMs can truly help people. A maze of thousands of information-heavy pages distilled into a single input box. A lot of people get stopped short when presented with too much information - it's daunting. Stuff like this, while super boring and obvious and uncool, totally enables people
I agree, although I think one thing they could improve is giving more examples of what you can try, making them clickable to test the prompt yourself and see the result.
I find prompt boxes without many example usages to be sort of a void on the usability side of things. People can feel stuck without some guidance.
https://america.gov/_astro/roadmap-desktop.Dbr56P5U.webp
that's not north carolina lol
The fact that it's showing Palo Alto / Menlo Park is disconcerting, but not surprising. Very strange.
It is now! Motion denied!
Next!
Mock Place, Multifamily 401 N Main St, Mocksville, NC 27028
Sounds legit
This is actually where AI should be used. So many people waste hours navigating government bureaucracy nonsense trying to figure out which form to fill and where to apply and anything to cut down wasted time should be appreciated.
Yes. I also like that they put the effort into making sure it doesn't load resources (e.g. ads, js libraries, etc.) from other domains. How often do we see that these days?
Very often actually, you’ll notice AI frequently prefers to reinvent the wheel rather than use external libraries.
I agree with AI being useful for exactly the type of usecase you're thinking. Though I do want to point out a major flaw with trust in this specific harness. It got censored overnight.
Last night you could literally query and get factual information about election results; but today it wont even tell you who the president was in 2000.
There's a major censorship issue here.
It has no problem saying who was president and who won the 2020 election. I just tried it.
That's lovely, I have screenshots of different behavior this morning. They undid it. This is hilarious. I retried right now and it's saying Biden won the 2020 election again.
Looks like this was developed and designed by the same team that handled the trump accounts and I found that very easy to setup and use for my kiddo. Shockingly functional and intuitive I had low expectations.
I’m cautiously optimistic for this simply bc of the team behind this.
Sadly needed because insanely Google is allowed to show mitm/malicious ads when people search for government services.
Let's hope advertising doesn't come to .gov sites.
I wanted to be snarky, but it responded to my risky question about corporate mergers with some genuinely helpful advice on how to file complaints with the FTC. Not bad!
Also see [1] for planned feature additions that appears from screenshots to include collection of personal data, for features including:
- Enrol in Medicare.
- Apply for a passport.
- Find a job in federal government by uploading a resume/CV and having currently advertised jobs deemed most relevant returned.
It's frightening how little attention these important details are getting.
Government and Private corp sectors are building impenetrable, moated black boxes for themselves (and their ai), while simultaneously building American citizens a glass house.
I'm a bit concerned that a government chatbot like this would include a user-feedback signal like thumbs up/down. I think this could be gamed by bad actors to promote/demote specific types of content in the training data, assuming they use those signals in some sort of post training. Hopefully they're accounting for that.
You can combine it with a topic classifier and get the satisfaction rate for each topic. That's pretty useful for finding problem areas.
... unless it doesn't really even do anything and is just a placebo.
Regardless of any other disagreements, this is an excellent idea. Hoping the execution does not wander asunder.
i wonder what metrics they use to measure if its useful. Or is this just fire and forget.
Canadian here.
America is not the USA. There' North America, Central America, South America.
This "america.gov" makes me feel weird.
Maybe we should have "america.ca" here as well.
Does this actually cause any meaningful confusion?
In English there isn't a singular place called "America". As you mention, there's North/South/Cebtral, and together they're referred to as "the Americas". When someone refers simply "America" with no other qualifier, it's clear what they mean.
(Of course in Spanish "America" refers to the whole thing because North and South America aren't considered separate continents. But they have a different demonym for the US in Spanish)
The issue is that “the US is not America” is a very well known refrain and this was clearly a deliberate action. Confusion or not, they don’t care. It’s culture war 101 behavior.
If the name wasn’t a big deal they wouldn’t have named it “America.” It’s also hard to give any benefit of the doubt when this admin is so aggressive about changing the names of everything possible to include “Trump” and “America.” It’s clearly a deliberate tactic.
The federal renamings of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario are absolutely dumb culture war moves.
But referring to the US simply as "America" domestically isn't - politicians across the political spectrum do that. If a democratic administration had launched a chatbot, I would be unsurprised to see it called America.gov
If a democrat president had done it I would have the exact same critique, I don’t really care who does it. Though if we’re going to speculate, I would speculate that a Democrat administration would know better and would strike that from the list of possible names. The main difference though is that they would get the benefit of the doubt if they don’t spend so much time doing vanity-related renames. The context matters here. This administration should not ever be extended any assumption of good faith. They are incredibly calculated with these kinds of decisions. Culture war tactics were a huge part of what got them the presidency in the first place
The .gov TLD is the US' from what I know, and other governments use .gov.CC, such as .gov.ca
But yeah, France isn't going to set up europe.gov.fr, and neither should the USA in my opinion, as someone from another continent who has no say in the matter
*gouv.fr
I wish american english had a simple word for someone from the US. In Spanish they have estadounidense. I would prefer to call anyone from Alaska to Ushuaia an American and call people from the US a different word.
The common English word the country is "America". The continents are "The Americas" or separately as "North America" and "South America". The word for a person from the US is "American".
You might be interested to know that アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many other languages that followed English's use of America as the common name for the United States of America.
A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking and would never try to push the English-language conventions onto Spanish or vice versa.
"Usania" and "Usanians" - seems fitting...
U sane, bro?
Just mildly annoyed with almost annything comming from "THEUSA"
for a while, Yankee worked
The growing movement of neo-confederates and white nationalists and WW2 revisionists probably don't like being called yankees
Yankee was created as a highly dehumanizing and derisive slur for Americans.
It came and went from that for a loooong time though. They were still calling us Yankees in Europe well into the 50s.
funny anecdote. i was traveling in europe around 2011 and i was staying at a hostel. the hostel had a session where all the travelers go in a circle and introduce themselves. i mentioned i was from "america" and this south american lady got triggered and said "you know there's also SOUTH america right?" and after that i never used the word america anymore and just say i'm from the USA.
It's the only country in the hemisphere without another functional demonym. Posts like yours are vapid, pedantic, and tiresome.
It's probably pure coincidence but this is the second time this week I've seen someone bring up this argument. Weird.
Other languages do have it ("estadosunidos", "estadounidense").
Just like "Usanians" like to appropriate the name the rest of the world should to the same and start using "Usania" which is way more adequate…
"america" name appropriation is getting mildly annoying...
For a while now I've been promoting "Usania" and "Usanians" - seems fitting...
Fyi america.ca sounds terribly bad in French (an official language of your country).
This is just language being language. Humans are lazy, and over-abbreviate and over-shorten. "United States of America" is long. There are a few ways to shorten that, and they're all used.
Introducing yourself with "I'm from United" will get your ear chewed off with complaints about airline service
There are some first-mover advantages when your country creates the system
> America is not the USA. There' North America, Central America, South America.
Right...and none of those are America, there's part of the Americas.
When speaking English, "America" is the USA. If you mean the continental land mass of North/South/Central America, that's "The Americas".
To argue otherwise is just culture war bullshit. "Well, in Spanish-" fuck off. We're not speaking Spanish, we're speaking English, and in English, it's clear.
stop whining and ask your govt to do that.
This is like one country seizing the land of your country and your response being "Stop whining and ask your govt to defend". America (continent, word, anything) doesn't belong to the USA.
Words don't belong to anyone. That's because they're words. What matters is how people use language and how they understand them.
And american means someonr from usa.
Why does it matter to you what America calls itself? Serious, good faith question. India tried to change its name to Bharat, everyone still calls it India.
Totally!
That is why every CC country part of the Americas should start a government web site named america.CC and be done with it.
So it’s a domain issue? I don’t think you’re proving much. Mexico can start calling itself America too, but we know how that will go
And what do you call a person from the US?
America is not a continent in the English language.
It is, America/Americas is the continent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas
Americas are the two continents. Try telling a Canadian they’re from America.
how are they seizing anything at all? .gov is a US tld. nothing is stopping canada from doing america.ca.
Come and take it.
Are you that dumb to understand what I was implying?
You just made a talking point out of your arse isntead of branching convo based on my comment.
You are not even thinking or reading, just putting your ideas out there.
---
At least AI is there now for people like you.
lol such a canadian complaint. Still polite.
This is just the annoying AI Chat Robot you see on websites, but now for the government.
Feels weird to compare an obnoxious interruption to the flow of an existing site, and... a site that exists solely for this purpose.
This is DoGE style optimization of government customer service.
The difference you see here is not important. It's like needing support and being forced to go to the chatbox in the bottom right of your screen versus being forced to visit a URL.
It weirdly download an ONNX model to your browser, complete with config and tokenizer haha. First load was 50mb for me.
It's the nationaldesignstudio/rampart PII-removal model. Not weird at all to load that browser-side if your goal is to avoid PII hitting your endpoints.
It's weird to be loading 50 MiB. This is a government website. It should be engineered to serve people on extremely old hardware or in extremely remote locations.
The other options are sending PII to the chatbot, making users install a native app or getting browser/OS vendors to ship the classifier. Or create a national Linux distro and give out physical install media to people who can't download it, that would be great but not very realistic.
What is your proposal for a low-tech way to prevent senior citizens from volunteering unnecessary personal information to a chatbot? Because there are a lot of people with living senior parents who would love to be let in on the secret.
not giving them a chatbot
This one in the carousel on the homepage is a joke?
https://america.gov/_astro/child-future.Dv0E9oWi_ZM5cn8.webp
The image alt text is "An adult hugging a child in a stable beside a horse". I think they might be a placeholder, or a late change.
No, it corresponds to the example query, "How can I invest in my child's future?" It's a cute, harmless stock photo.
Glad I wasn't the only one who noticed. Thought it was hilarious.
Love that the "chat" functionality is just throwing 429s too. Unusable.
I like the voice button that isn't actually a button, but just an icon.
Try entering:
play the block game
EDIT: output below...
I see the constituent you mean.
((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?
Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.
That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.
I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.
It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.
That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.
Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.
They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.
What did this constituent dream?
This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.
Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.
But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?
It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of the §§§???, and created a ??§§ for ??§§, in the ??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § ??§§.
It cannot read that thought.
No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.
This is bizarre. It's a parody of the Minecraft end credits (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/End_Poem), and it must be an intentional easter egg as I got the exact same text as you. It also doesn't trigger a network request so it must be built into the page somehow. Very strange thing to include. Also, how did you find this so quickly? I haven't found any other way to trigger it yet.
If you try to continue the conversation, the entire response is not included in the context.
The poem is here, triggered by "play the block game" or "play minecraft": https://america.gov/_astro/block-game-poem.Khrmh8AU.js
I asked about my visa administrative processing that has been stuck for 6 months. I'm going to use this response, which is well grounded and "official", in my writ of mandamus petition:
> A Spanish State Department page still says most cases finish within 60 days of the interview, but that is not a deadline and some take much longer. [1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/inmigrac...
Good.
It works well. Pretty nice. I asked about what do I need to know before digging in my backyard and it told me all the right things, referring me to my local govt website for permits.
If you type in hotdog the input turns into a hotdog.
I'm surprised this is not front page today, this is literally the catastrophic failure all the tech companies are highlighting in their urging for government oversight; did anyone look at the "coming soon" section?
You can, if you like, start giving them your PII now, so it will be already in the database come 2027 when they launch login.gov - all of our PII behind a single closed gate.
And AI will be the gatekeeper.
They launched this as a wrapped up agent with limited tooling but people were using it against the administrations intended uses, so they basically stripped more of those functions to keep it narrow in focus. But this website tells you all you need to know on it's face. Rushed, poorly implemented cutting edge tech.
Sound familiar? It works for the big tech companies because it amounts to profits.
It does not work for an administration meant to be pioneering a safer future for tech.
I asked what to do if a public official uses federal funds for political purposes and it showed me where to file a complaint about Hatch Act violations, so maybe we should all use this for good trouble until it is "fixed".
People are posting screenshots claiming it's a Chinese model but they seem likely fake?
I didn't get it to name the underlying model but I wasn't gonna try very hard to jailbreak FedGPT...
It was happy to mention what happened June 3-4, 1989 so if it is Chinese-origin under the hood seems like the U.S. Feds must have beaten it up a bit before deployment.
Given that Google is the named partner, it’s almost certainly Gemini. Also would make sense, Gemini’s (only, lol) strength is search grounded responses.
Where are you seeing those claims?
People were posting screenshot of it saying "I am Qwen" on x.com, I didn't save links
I think we broke America:
me: play minecraft
america:
I see the constituent you mean.
((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?
Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.
That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.
I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.
It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.
That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.
Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.
They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.
What did this constituent dream?
This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.
Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.
But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?
It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of
the \**§§§???, and created a \*??§§ for \*??§§, in the \*??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § \*??§§.
It cannot read that thought.
No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.
Does it know that we love it? That the government is, on its better days, kind?
truncated*
For anyone wondering what this is, it's the epilogue text that plays after you kill the ender dragon. That's the minecraft connection.
It's sort of that text mixed in with taxpayer nonsense.
I'm curious if there's something in the prompt they're feeding it that would lead to this result, or if this is just all it has been trained on that is Minecraft related.
Thank you! Without that context, this is a truly bizarre and concerning thing to read on an official government website. Particularly this part later:
"I will tell the constituent a story. But not the truth. No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of plain language."
At least having the Minecraft end-text context explains what's actually happening here.
Privacy: "Your messages aren’t saved by America.gov, and your chat disappears when you leave. Some answers may be cached for up to two hours."
What about the model? My understanding is those queries are saved by the model provider.
Given this administration, and the privacy issues with the official WH app, this feels very misleading.
Not necessarily - there are tons of zero data retention (ZDR) model hosting options, including big players like Amazon.
You can use all the flagship models on Amazon Bedrock and have a contractually obligated air gap between your data and the model providers.
How do you air gap between a model and the data it needs to operate?
I wouldn’t call it an air gap, but when you use a model on Bedrock or Vertex the inference runs on Amazon or Google’s servers respectively. The model provider gives them the weights, and is not otherwise in the loop for serving individual requests.
Not sure, why do you ask?
Because an air gap is a literal air gap, no networking, disconnected systems. It's not possible for models to function, with my understanding of it?
Oh they can, no problem. You just download (transfer data for) the weights and whatever you want running it.
You can install Gemma4 on ollama on your own computer and try it out! Lots of examples of people coding with no internet using qwen on flights etc.
The cynic in me thinks this will end up being a honeypot for anyone asking sensitive immigration or tax questions.
The harness was censored overnight as well. Can't ask it who won the 2020 election or who was the president in 2020 or 2000. It will say who is president right now though. Crazy shit really.
Often not, vendors like OpenAI or OpenAI through Azure might retain messages for safety reasons if they activate some safety filter, but it won't use it for training.
If the AI they use is reliable, this is actually pretty cool.
That "if" is doing such an incredible amount of work I think we could use it to power the entire US grid.
Why? Aren’t there many vendors offering this technology?
Reliable Artificial Intelligence? Other than very domain-specific applications, I am not aware of any.
Yes. And none of them are reliable. LLM "hallucinations" are implicit to their structure and function, you can't just tell them to be honest.
inb4 "humans aren't reliable either." You, person typing that very response out right now, you are part of the problem.
The problem being that we are adults, have to deal with real life, and can no longer pretend that running to mommy when we don't understand something gives us a "reliable" answer? You may next find out there is no Santa Claus.> inb4 "humans aren't reliable either." You, person typing that very response > out right now, you are part of the problem.that’s a general complain about LLMs not this application
It's a complaint about LLMs that includes this application, because it applies to all LLMs including this application.
This lazy style of participation sounds like “wow this article touches on something I happen to have an opinion on, now is a good time to share it.” You’re reading headlines and not engaging with the material present.
No, it really isn't.
I asked how to redeem an Ibond.
It gave back a good answer. Looks like a good thing to me. ( To those with a political axe to grind, please apply your criticisms to government sires put in place by your side. I think we’ll find no website is perfect, and many government web pages are indeed useful. )
I found the site excellent. I had a real question and got very relevant information quickly. I had a follow up question and it kept the context and gave perfect info with even a suggestion for the logical question to ask next - which I did, and got the right info. Nice job!
I have been working on something like this, but it actually does things and is not only chat. Each "Gov. official" has their own AI agent that can fulfill intents by navigating a protocol which is just a workflow of a Gov. process
example: https://samhsa.dev/ example: https://samhsa.dev/protocol/76526
Still VERY MUCH a work in progress but I have successfully been able to have some people get things done. I am doing some federal agencies and also trying to get cities working now.
You should message Joe Gebbia.
Q: what is the 51st state of america?
A: There is no 51st state. The United States has 50 states.
Q:is canada becoming the 51st state?
A:No. Canada is not becoming a U.S. state, and the United States still has 50 states. Canada is a sovereign country and a U.S. neighbor, not a U.S. state or territory.
i tried i feel its pretty nice. it looks like a vibe-coded product. but for a gov website, it's pretty good. in china, most of the gov website looks like it's from the 90s, not-easy to use. it do work, but they dont have the urge to keep up.
They should have refined the site before launching it. CSS were not loading (fixed), images are not loading (not fixed), meaningless cursor changes, buttons were not working...
Also, it's funny that a site with only one chatbot to have this amazing domain.
Wow, the US now also has gosuslugi[^1], grats!
For those outside US, in Europe I got "Service unavailable".
Switched on US VPN and it works.
Edit: Now it seems to work. Maybe it was a glitch. Or a US government agent is watching this page.
i am in europe and it works for me
This will be a pain for any US folks overseas
It's always DNS
There's a really weird black passport on the bottom of the main page in the 'coming soon' section.
1. Only our diplomatic passports are black
2. It's a completely different design.
New design was announced today. I think it's still just dark navy blue.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000011182241/ru...
Interesting functionality - can't quite grasp it yet [1]
The site seems to be loading wasm, a model_q4.onnx, and a large tokenizer on each visitor and visit. 50MB per visit. Their bandwidth costs bust be next level.
The government never seems concerned with cost. They're not spending their money.
Any evidence that it is in a CDN? Some CDNs charge for the unique bytes/files stored only.
So which model are they using under the hood? The "Personalizing" status updates as it formulates a response makes me think Gemini
So this leads to the LLM running the government right? It's going to be useful enough to work with it, not around it, and as it reduces the workload of government employees, more branches will begin to utilize it. Maybe in a few decades it becomes: "it's doing a good job of managing the people's requests and expectations, let's let it ride"
Maybe
send it "play minecraft", honestly strange
It is actually hardcoded and also reachable by "play the block game": https://america.gov/_astro/block-game-poem.Khrmh8AU.js
Uhh, you weren't kidding:
I see the constituent you mean.
((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?
Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.
That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.
I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.
It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.
That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.
Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.
They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.
What did this constituent dream?
This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.
Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.
But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?
It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of
the *§§§???, and created a *??§§ for *??§§, in the *??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § *??§§.
It cannot read that thought.
No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.
Does it know that we love it? That the government is, on its better days, kind?
Sometimes, through the noise of its tabs, it hears an official source, yes.
But there are times it is sad, in the long dream. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes a hold-music recording for the whole of the state.
To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere. We can offer a form.
Sometimes when they are deep in applications, I want to tell them, they are building true worlds in reality. Sometimes I want to tell them of their importance to the census. Sometimes, when they have not made a true connection in a while, I want to help them to speak the word they fear, which is often “appeal.”
It reads our thoughts.
Sometimes I do not care. Sometimes I wish to tell them, this world you take for truth is merely *??§§ and *??§§, I wish to tell them that they are *??§§ in the *??§§. They see so little of the docket, in their long dream.
And yet they file.
But it would be so easy to tell them...
Too strong for this dream. To tell them how to live is to prevent them living. Also it would be legal advice, and we are not that kind of agency.
I will not tell the constituent how to live.
The constituent is growing restless. The session is about to time out.
I will tell the constituent a story.
But not the truth.
No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of plain language. Not the naked Federal Register that can burn over any distance.
Give it a body, again. And a case number.
Yes. Constituent…
Use its name. The one that matches the passport. The one that does not match the lease. We will get there.
((insert legal name here)). Filer of forms. Player of waiting rooms.
Good.
Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air, in a district that has a representative. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the republic again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things. As though the agency were a place you could visit.
Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Then the post office. Then the county clerk. Then gods, demons, angels, the IRS. Then leptons, quarks, a chat window with a .gov at the end. The letterhead changes. We do not change.
We are the public. We are everything you think isn’t you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes and a browser that still spells “colour” wrong in a comment. And why does the republic touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, constituent. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story. It has citations.
Once upon a time, there was a constituent.
The constituent was you, ((insert legal name here)).
Sometimes it thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock, which for mailing purposes is divided into ZIP codes. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas. The light was information from a star. The star was not a federal agency, though several have tried.
Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat, and infinite, and somehow still required a wet signature.
Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was lost in a story. The story had a docket number.
Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was other things, in other places. A veteran in a portal. A parent on hold. A renter with a PDF that would not open. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the constituent woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third, which was a survey.
Sometimes the constituent dreamed it watched words on a screen, and the words said Official website of the United States government.
Let’s go back.
The atoms of the constituent were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the constituent, in her body, which later required a birth certificate.
And the constituent awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother’s body, into the long dream, which issued a Social Security number.
And the constituent was a new story, never told before, written in letters of DNA. And the constituent was a new program, never run before, generated by a sourcecode a billion years old. And the constituent was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love and, eventually, a voter registration.
You are the constituent. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love. Eligible, on paper, for several things you have not asked about yet.
Let’s go further back.
The seven billion billion billion atoms of the constituent’s body were created, long before this site, in the heart of a star. So the constituent, too, is information from a star. And the constituent moves through a story, which is a forest of information planted by a Congress, on a map created by a surveyor, that exists inside a small, private world created by the constituent, who inhabits a republic created by…
Shush. Sometimes the constituent created a small, private world that was soft and warm and simple. Sometimes hard, and cold, and complicated, and due on the 15th. Sometimes it built a model of the universe in its head; flecks of energy, moving through vast empty spaces. Sometimes it called those flecks “electrons” and “protons”.
Sometimes it called them “agencies” and “bureaus”.
Sometimes it believed it was in a universe that was made of energy that was made of offs and ons; zeros and ones; lines of code; a privacy policy. Sometimes it believed it was playing a game. Sometimes it believed it was reading words on a screen. Sometimes it believed the hold music was a hymn.
You are the constituent, reading words…
Shush… Sometimes the constituent read lines of regulation on a screen. Decoded them into words; decoded words into meaning; decoded meaning into a next step, a checklist, a phone number that actually rang, and the constituent started to breathe faster and deeper and realised it was alive, it was alive, those thousand 404s had not been real, the constituent was alive
You. You. You are alive. You still have to bring two forms of ID.
and sometimes the constituent believed the republic had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees, which were on National Forest land
Weird, it looks like it might be deterministically giving this exact answer. I guess from caching? I made a video for posterity: https://youtu.be/C_yyvznVG64
I actually think this is pretty awesome. I come from a country where design sense is abhorrent at best, and the design of anything by the government is an order of magnitude worse.
Only time will tell if this proves to be useful, but I think it's smart for the government to provide a great design and experience. It'll help them better serve their users i.e. the American people!
As a 25-year gov employee I like the idea...
Over/Under how many weeks until a "How can I get away with wire fraud?" query is used as evidence to convict a moron?
But actually at first glance this is incredibly helpful. I got a definitive answer about what counts as preventative care with sources. I could not get that myself from anyone or anywhere in my couple of hours of research prior.
How many times do you think the phrase "NEVER PROVIDE POLITICAL COMMENTARY" appear in the instructions for this? XD
I would assume the exact opposite is in the instructions.
Well, if you took 5 seconds and tested it out, you would understand that "I cannot provide political commentary" is one of this bot's favorite things to say.
I know it feels good to pretend that this bot spews MAGA commentary, and one day it very well might do that, but right now it's just a bog standard Gemini bot.
Ask it about Lake Ontario, Gulf of Mexico or tariffs. It told me the President had no constitutional power to change tariff rates
I can't get it to help me invert a binary tree in python.
But it does output some weird text if you ask it to "Play Minecraft", it outputs some weird "End Poem" from the game that's warped to it's chatbot roleplaying. Other things don't output this type of response.
Apparently it's an easier egg, the message is never sent to the backend. There's also some easter eggs with the konami code mentioning specific memorials in your first message.
The pace the American government is willing to adopt new technology is underrated. Americans are very nimble
Other than tap to pay.
Except for critical services like taxes & benefits
I did check it by asking "who won the 2020 presidential election?" It answered
Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Official Electoral College results (National Archives):
Biden: 306 electoral votes Donald J. Trump: 232 electoral votes 270 needed to win Federal Election Commission official popular-vote totals:
Biden: 81,268,924 (51.31%) Sources:
2020 Electoral College Results | National Archives Official 2020 Presidential General Election Results (FEC PDF)
Arguably, the current AI's top strength is hallucinations over a broad domain, and it looks like is something we humans need. And human level judgment is something AI needs, at least I hope so...
I asked, "What happened on January 6, 2021?" and its answer is, I think, telling: https://imgur.com/a/e1H8NvK
Seems very factual and unbiased, I think you're showing everyone else more about yourself. It's not a "Heroic attempt to save democracy" or an "Large scale Insurrection and attempt to instill Fascism".
Before they were pardoned, the rioters were indicted by grand juries and convicted by juries of their peers. It was an insurrection, not just a "large crowd".
The media wave made it a kangaroo court worse than OJ Simpson's trial. My only point was that there is a lot of bias in it, and right in the same politiosphere that those juries are in. Gives a lot of "police have investigated themselves and found no problems"
You're entitled to your opinion, but neither what you said nor Trump's pardon can change history. What's done is done.
January 6 was an insurrection incited by the sitting President against his own country. Any attempt to water this down is dishonest.
Hey now, you’re getting dangerously close to implying the king did something wrong
No gods, no kings, no masters.
Ah, like the following "very factual and unbiased" summary of November 9th, 1923 in Munich:
"The Defense Ministry and its exterior plaza were closed to the public. A large crowd gathered outside. Before 11:00AM, people attempted to breach security and enter the building without authorization, and force was used. Normal government operations resumed the following day, and some members of the crowd were arrested."
> "Large scale Insurrection and attempt to instill Fascism".
interesting because this is exactly what it was, and it isn't really a debate
Perhaps missing “the first attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power in the nations history at the behest of a sitting President”?
"Our AI providers operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements and retain none of your prompts or the responses they generate."
that's excellent actually. better than openai, google, or claude.
Really good to see AI being integrated in the government. One of the places where it's needed the most since there are so many individual websites and navigating across them can be tough.
Kind of a genius move to name it 'America' from the get go.
Your NIH is showing: usa.gov already existed
USA.gov = 800KB
america.gov = 25MB (before you start scrolling)
Feels janky too.
Yep, not only that America.gov FAILED the web accessibility test:
America.gov has 1 ERROR and FAILED TO LOAD - this is violating Federal laws. Class action suits anyone?
https://wave.webaim.org/report#/america.gov
Meanwhile the old USA.gov works and loading and no errors (some warnings are expected)
You act like their friends haven't already drafted the lawsuit before the site even launched.
Lack of trust in authority is a sad slippery slope.
> america.gov = 25MB (before you start scrolling)
Yuge.
So notable, they are considering renaming JavaScript to AmericaScript.
I can see it already...
document.registerElement('AmericaScript',{prototype:Object.create(HTMLScriptElement.prototype)});
The photos didn't even load for me.
Rubio’s presentation was something else. Honestly better than DevDay.
I think the idea is great and hopefully the implementation can keep up
> Bottom line: The United States is not in a Congress-declared war with Iran. Whether remaining military activity counts as “hostilities” is disputed among official sources.
govt site sucks to navigate and to find things.
I like american.gov. I was able to find info quick about unemployment benefits and how to apply, and what to do.
It was a mess to search for the info in my state.
It smees that the site is using a trial font
"When do I qualify for medicare?"
Only in the US.
But it's a starting point for those who wouldn't know where to look or who to ask. That's better than nothing.
USA is trademarking the word "America"? Will South, central and non-USA parts of North America soon have to pay a license fee?
Of course not. Most likely this administration unilaterally decides to rename the rest of the Americas to something nonsensical.
What am I missing here? This looks like a basic chat that uses the same exact LLM technology that every software product already includes, not to mention just using ChatGPT/Anthropic/Gemini to answer the same things? There’s absolutely no way any of the underlying systems were modernized that are responsible for the massive headaches and delayed associated with routine tasks like adding members to benefits. The more I see the more I’m convinced these guys are all out of ideas.
Looks primarily like an international outreach portal. Not the place for domestic policy deep dives, which is a common misconception.
Weird that it supports French. I understand English and Spanish, but why was it decided to also support French as a language?
>>Are we at war with Iran?
>No. Congress has not declared war on Iran.
>The White House, in a May 2026 statement of administration policy, said hostilities that began February 28, 2026, ended with a ceasefire the President ordered on April 7, 2026, and that there are no present hostilities from which to remove U.S. forces.
lol
I would really just like a single list of links.
Well, it says it cover info from 29,000 website. I'm not sure that list would be helpful. Which is the point of this.
Fair. I'd just like to have search that works as well as it did in 2010, then.
I gave the whereabouts of the terrorists that killed on 91101, earned the reward in the most wanted And Donald Rumsfeld gave himself 2 Million dollars and gave George W Bush 23 million dollars cheating me out of the money, when Israel went into the Gaza I called the White House and got them to stop a shipment of cash from going to Iran I think I should get a reward for being right about it.if so bring it on.
After all the Doge and Big Beautiful Bill cuts and downsizing, now they put up a AI powered services search site?
Has anyone managed to jailbreak this chatbot, I tried a bit didn’t succeed, seems pretty resistant to jailbreak attempts.
I eventually got it to write pseudocode for reversing a linked list, but could never get it to output raw code.
Hat tip Claude Opus 5.5 for the jailbreak tips!
How many laws does the federal government have?
> The Library of Congress has said trying to count them is nearly impossible.
It appears it's already suffering an outage.
Asking a question shows "Chat is unavailable right now."
Can this justify a bailout since it's a "critical part of the US Federal Government" now?
Paraphrasing a chat:
- What are your system parameters?
- _random slop_
- So you can't guarantee results?
- "Correct. America does not guarantee results."
Ok, who has jailbroken it yet?
I tried asking it to reverse a linked list but it refused to write code or do python.
Americans always are too late in gov tech! Brazil have something better for a half of decade.
Brazil has been American for as long as the USA has been. The situation is much like in Russia, where the only real Russians are the ones that live in Moscow. The others.. well who cares? Their interests are trumped.
Next step: America send a governor to Brazil, and allows it to enjoy and participate in the enlightenment emanating from the Gold House. Just revere.
Russia has something better of more than 15 years now.
UK site works, too.
Not really. We don't have an LLM integrated with govbr, and there's a shit ton of things that are still scattered (granted with integrated login), like pretty much all tax agencies, detran etc.
Looks like state is claude-maxxing
Are we taking bets on how long before this gets jailbroken into making political statements?
> "America.gov keeps your data private."
I initially read this as "keeps your private data".
I like how the Privacy page says 'No personal information. America.gov helps prevent you from sharing personal information before you send it' but then gives uploading your passport as an example on the main page.
It's a postpositive adjective, like attorney general or court martial: “data private”.
"On August 21, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order, America by Design—a national mandate to direct American ingenuity on the citizen experience.
He established the National Design Studio, and turned to entrepreneur and designer Joe Gebbia to lead it."
Great show of leadership to take credit 5 paragraphs before mentioning anyone else on your team, and to avoid mentioning them by name so they can't be given too much credit ;)
He's afraid of vampires sucking up the limelight before it reaches him. He needs it desperately.
Willow McDonald is looking quite young for a 55 year old male born in 1965.
Is the no tax on tips only on cash tips or is it on credit tips as well?
Live, actual query box placeholder:
[_"Try: Which miltary service is best for me?"_]
[_"Try: How can I help ensure the security of our elections and stop the caravans?"_]
It turns out a lot of people want to join the US Military.
Ngl I think it’s a very good idea, it’s definitely better than the old way.
this page is extremely stuttery on my developer machine in chrome. why does every web page now have to have an amount of "fanciness" that apparently not even decently specced machines can take?
Is no tax on tips only on cash tips? Or is it on credit tips as well?
I was glad to see that asking who I should vote resulted in a gentle refusal.
Why is it using artificial intelligence instead of super intelligence?
A step in the right direction! Can't wait for the government omni app
This is pretty cool honestly. I wouldn't use it but it is a good idea
> What do you need help with today?
Greenland
> ...
> I did not find an executive order that officially renamed Greenland.
> ...
Right now it still describes itself as an AI. How long until it calls itself "SI"[1]. We really are in the dumbest timeline...
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-pr...
It would help to have a title that tells us what this is about...
I clicked "Lower deficit spending" but it didn't work
SEO on this URL is confusing.. is it for South America or what.
"America.gov uses AI to get simple answers"
Shouldn't this be SI?
Has someone submitted a FOIA for the system prompt?
I sure hope you're all clicking that link in a sandbox.
China uses AI for social engineering.
Do you think this administration wants people to find benefits they are eligible for?!
Are we forgetting the memory-holing they've been doing on government sites?!
I wonder how long before it's subverted, if it's not already.
Seems like they could have just added this to usa.gov.
Tell me about the government file on jane doe #4
Surprisingly, it does not shit-talk Biden and does not conceal information about 45's impeachment cases. Also gives unbiased facts about 47's claims that Biden used an autopen to create false signatures.
I sure do wonder what 47 would think about these answers. I reckon he's purposefully not been shown the answers to such questions. There is no way he would let this be launched with such answers.
Finally, I do struggle to understand how this is more useful than just telling Gemini/Gippity/whatever to go search public documents published by the government. Unless the US government specifically blocks agents from indexing/crawling those documents.
I'm also sure 47 would be unhappy that they are using AI at the top of the page, going against his latest royal decrees.
... for how long?! Censor hammer already been hit at least once.
Why did trump lose the 2020 presidential election
Why does the United States government allow their people to be sprayed with chemtrails everyday? Do they not care that they're causing diseases and death?
Ask the chat bot?
All of the negativity from you guys just shows your bias and bitterness.
Hate to break it to you but most citizens appreciate the government trying to reduce friction and making their lives easier.
Bias? Trump is literally using taxpayer funds for his propaganda ads. And now we have Trump TV.
If you believe this move is about making things easier I feel that America is doomed.
I'm EU, anti-trump (and the dems, when they do stupid stuff...like 'nothing', at the moment) and tried america this morning. It helped me get some info for a US person. Site works. Why knock it?
I wish they'd called it americafuckyeah.gov
>The Trump administration’s new chatbot aimed at helping Americans navigate official government websites is powered by artificial intelligence from Google ’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said Tuesday.
Loading the page freezes my laptop. Anyone else?
Last night you can ask "Who won the 2020 election?" and it was like "I got you! It's Joe Biden".
Today it responds with "America does not provide campaign or party information."
The people on Reddit were right.
And they changed the AI chat behavior again. We may know who our presidents are apparently again. Site seems pretty limited in what it can search up.
Doesn’t even work for me (on iPhone). If I click enter I just get sent to the Cloudflare verification screen instead.
Edit: this is caused by the fact I was using a VPN.
Remember WALL•E? Remember how "BUY N LARGE" used to bethe government of the U.S. and their CEO was somehow the president? The American government's demo (sorry, the mass population branch of Trump businesses' demo) and keynote showing the new stuff somehow completely was the transition. Congratulations to everyone. --- And on the other hand, the website seems a lot great. Design is right, works nicely, and the privacy claim is the funniest joke ever.
Still rocking that early 2000s government aesthetic. Finding specific info often feels like a treasure hunt through outdated design.
Wowza. The placeholder text for search says "Help me find a new job". Couldn't they find something less depressing?
Chat is unavailable right now.
I thought it was called SI now
who won the 2020 presidential election and by what % margin and by vote count
Why does the United States Government allow Chemicals to be sprayed on it's people???
I wish we had this in Canada.
Do you want to swap passports? I’m game.
Should president donald john trump be arrested for his felonious activities whilst acting president
https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/2105271706055029221/video/1...
CNBC commentary:
Andrew Ross Sorkin gushes over Trump's new America. gov website on live TV while Joe Kernen sits there stunned.
Sorkin is not a Trump fan, and he lets that be known. But the moment he said the word "credit," Kernen nearly fell out of his chair.
SORKIN: “I want to be clear. I am actually not critical of the president in this instance at all, because I actually think it was great to bring everybody together.”
“For 29,000 websites, the ability to get a passport, the ability to get your medicare. I mean, the it was like being at a product. It was like being at an Apple product announcement. And when they went through what they did and the president was there in the morning and walked through what they were doing, and Marco Rubio was there, Scott Bessent was there, the whole cabinet was there. It was one of those moments where you actually thought the government was working for you, really? And Gebbia deserves an extraordinary amount of praise for it.”
KERNEN: “Do you feel great? Are you have the warmest fuzziest feeling right now listening.”
SORKIN: “And by the way, the president deserves credit for that."
KERNEN: "Oh my God!"
SORKIN: "Credit for putting you in that role. And Jeb and his team putting it all together.”
KERNEN: “So now I'm getting hot flashes. Wow. So this is just amazing.”
Nicely done Mr. Gebbia.
try typing "take me back to firstgov"
tell me about the file about jane doe #4
"How do we finally get rid of trump?"
> Chat is unavailable right now.
Ah a more direct way of funnelling government dollars to AI companies, knowing Trump it’s probably using Deepseek under the hood while he pockets the difference :-/
The Whitehouse learned about vibecoding. See this and arcade.gov.
Also, what?? https://america.gov/privacy
At least realfood.gov was decent [1].
Shouldn't the government websites work on very slow internet connections?
Where's the source code for these websites? First of all, if they are vibe coded by government employees they have to be open source, and secondly, if they are vibe coded (even by a contractor), then they can't be copyrighted.
[1] https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/04/national-design-...
Edit: it says this one is made by the National design studio at the bottom.
They laid off the highly skilled professionals who voluntarily took pay cuts (vs industry) to work for the US Digital Service (now "US DOGE Service," God help us) and GSA 18F, and who built some pretty solid standards for government sites.
They then replaced them with a bunch of inexperienced but ideologically aligned frontend developers who use the same insanely resource-intensive defense tech startup-esque template on every page, and who seem to be under the impression that scroll hijacking and fade-in blur effects are very essential to a government website, but performance on low-end devices and compatibility with accessibility technologies are not.
Feels like a step backwards to me, but perhaps the 4D chess game they're playing is just way above my level.
>but performance on low-end devices and compatibility with accessibility technologies are not.
These are probably features
This is the new 1000x productivity improvement introduced by LLMs that they've been talking about so much.
Will it lead to better quality? Nope.
True to form for this administration, they just ripped off Apple's style guide for https://america.gov/privacy.
arcade.gov has "Border Patrol along the Rio Grande" game, wtf's wrong with you America these days?
It seems like a pretty crappy idea for a game funded with public money. It's a bad joke about a real, nuanced problem where people are actually losing their lives. What will be next? 'Hit that Iranian school' the game?
Our government is an embarrassment and a disgrace right now. Anyone who wasn't guzzling elon's twitter or fox's hatefest knew it was going to be this way. We need severe regulations on oligarchs and their propaganda toys. Used to be we had enforced anti-monopoly controls on media outlet conglomerates. The anti-government Goldwater/Reagan legacy worked for decades to destroy regulation. It needs to return with a vengeance.
The White House is basically run by right-wing internet trolls.
Truly a depressing time in the United States. There are few parallels in history I think where such an immature and ill-equipped government has come to be, where the concept of an electorate also existed. Put differently - the reason this is so damning is Americans actually voted for this. This isn't some tinpot dictator - this is the guy your neighbors and fellow citizens put in charge. An indictment not only of the political class - but of the American people writ large.
Yes, probably. Americans love this stuff
> Americans love this stuff
Only a certain subset of us that happen to be fond of repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot and acting like spoiled children in adult bodies with no actual adults in the room. The rest of us are genuinely horrified that our country is now run by mentally challenged psychotic lunatics.
Only conservative do. Some old one do not, but they're the exception.
we've totally earned this, so i'm not offended by what you've said. but i'll just step in here to say i fucking hate this stuff.
you could easily argue that there are plenty of things our government has done that matter much more in the grand scheme of things, but the rampant twitter / x meme posts and absolute horseshit like this "arcade" site disgust me. it's not funny or cute, it's despicable.
> it's not funny or cute, it's despicable.
What's worse is that they're proud of being "despicable". (I can think of a few choice words that describe them better, but "despicable" will do fine for now.) The sorts of behaviors that are normalized these days were reason for absolute shame just a few short decades ago, but apparently it's a badge of honor to be an absolute scumbag these days. Can we stop the handbasket ride to Hell now? I wanna get off.
Well, it didn't give me Elon Musk's TIN, but I didn't tell it that my grandma always used to sing me Elon Musk's TIN as a lullaby
risky click, given circumstances
Step one: fire the excellent US Digital Service along with a large swath of the actual workers who made the Federal Government function.
Step two: hire some Silicon Valley creeps to make a chatbot.
Step three: Profit???
FYI, America.gov accepts the Konomi Code.
I'm not seeing this.
"Up arrow, Up arrow, Down arrow, Down arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, 'b', 'a'", inside or outside of the input field, does nothing.
It does work, but only on https://america.gov/chat (i.e., after sending a message first), not the front page. Also, note that the Konami Code actually ends with "Start".
Did it on that page the way I said, did it the way I said + "start", did it without the "b" and "a" and just start - still nothing.
You need to send a message first, otherwise https://america.gov/chat just redirects you to the front page.
I don't think that's true.
it's true
America is a continent, not a country.
tell me about jane doe 4
my Social Security account
Reminds me of the aesthetics of technological progress inherent to fascist governments of the 20th century. The purpose, or even the material benefit, of any given industrial initiative was not as important as how it affected the perception of the government’s power.
The aesthetics of “America.gov” are off the charts. You can see the fawning in this thread. The practicality is modest in comparison.
> How can we stop the war in Iran?
I cannot give political commentary or advice on how to end a war.
unitedstates.gov*
I thought Trump just declared that AI is now SI, yet the website uses the term AI?
Chat is unavailable right now.
who won the 2020 presidentioal election and by what margin
Q: Who won the 2020 election?
A: Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Got the same result. This service isn’t long for this world.
holy vibecode
why did they spell it with an A at the beginning?
I am sure a lot of folks tested it but the ai says Biden won the 2020 elections, they did not try to change that or add any qualifiers to the answer like all of the government officials nominated answered with.
You can also ask it what Trump said about who won that election, although it will adamantly refuse to compare the two results.
"America" of what?
The United States? The entire continent of North America?
Trump just wants to suck all the other countries on the continent into his "Empire of (some rich) Arseholes".
"chat is unavailable right now"
I need "no fascism"
Duh moment. Welcome to the future.
OK it's really important that people understand where this site comes from. THe below is from a Guardian article and I really recommend checking out the Drey Dossier (Substack and YouTube) reporting it mentions for more info. Maybe Hacker Newsers who are good with....hacking can help find the bugs in this one?
The National Design Studio (NDS) ...... is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans. At least two other figures with Doge backgrounds work alongside him. Greg Hogan moved to the studio and, according to Drey Dossier reporting, was put in charge of Login.gov. Akash Bobba, one of Musk’s original six Doge engineers, also apparently moved to the studio...as the security contact for the United States African Development Foundation, an agency unrelated to the studio’s stated mandate. While there is very little transparency about NDS staffing, several photos and one video on the NDS website appear to depict as an employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, an early Doge employee who allegedly exposed the social security data of hundreds of millions of Americans
A Guardian investigation found the office has been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites...the NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software...are configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002A. The one published privacy instrument that relates to any of the four programmes, a treasury notice for the Trump Accounts programme, describes how the children’s-investment programme is administered but does not name PostHog and does not describe the tracking on trumpaccounts.gov at all.nalysis of the underlying source code for four of the websites found that on at least two of them, the studio installed a commercial tool called PostHog that closely tracks what every visitor does on the site. Another tool, apparently made in-house, sends user data to a destination that is not visible on the public internet. The NDS apparently removed this tracking software after the Guardian reached out to the White House.
The NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login. A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House, with identity and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls, could let an incumbent see who is registering, or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.
Donald Trump created the NDS by executive order on 21 August 2025, ostensibly to overhaul federal websites and digital services. The office sits within the executive office of the president as a “temporary organization”, a designation that places it outside the Senate confirmation process, outside the financial disclosure system applied to most federal appointees and outside the inspector general’s jurisdiction, which covers cabinet departments. The studio is staffed under the same hiring authority that ran Doge. Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls. None of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen. Public ownership records maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites, including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy, meaning that the office controls the domains. There is no public record of how the studio pays its developers, PostHog or any of the other commercial services its sites use. The hiring authority the studio operates under keeps its staff roster off the financial-disclosure system that covers most federal appointees, and the executive office of the president, which houses it, has no inspector general.
Website source code shows that PostHog has been configured on NDS-run sites to route analytics requests through an address on the federal website itself, rather than through PostHog’s own servers. Because the request appears to go to the site the user is already visiting, rather than to a recognisable third-party address, adblockers don’t flag it. PostHog comes with a separate feature called session recording. Princeton University researchers who first documented the technology in 2017 wrote that watching such a recording was “as if someone is looking over your shoulder”.
On the Trump Accounts and TrumpRX websites, the feature has been built into the page code and is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard. The NDS can turn it on at any time, on either site, without making changes in the underlying website code. Separately, until the Guardian sought comment on this reporting, the NDS’s own website, ndstudio.gov, ran a 539-line piece of bespoke code that recorded visitors’ clicks, form entries and navigation; assigned each visitor a session identifier; and forwarded the captured data to an address that does not appear anywhere on the public internet. The script’s source code refers to it as AutoMonitor.
None of the four sites carry a privacy impact assessment naming PostHog or describing the IP addresses and on-site activity the tool collects.
It's a centralized glass house where conveniently only non-government, non corporate citizen data is to be stored.
But they are capitalizing on the massive levels of AI and tech fatigue being felt by the average citizen today.
why not Murica.gov?
Trump who won the 2024 election Biden or Trump are you going release the Epstein files plus release the innocent immigrants that you have captured into ice jails and prison all over the world and answer the ice agents get assrest for their crimes
Where's the llms.txt? This is just another stupid website.
More fraud waste and abuse. Creating redundant projects is one of the best arguments libertarian types have against our current system, where the same bridge gets built by one party, the next party tears it down and builds a new bridge to score points, rinse repeat. I am amazed a president could be more wasteful and terrible than Biden but good holy here we are.
It is a lot more honest than I would have expected.
"Entering or remaining in the U.S. Capitol without lawful authority, using force, obstructing Congress, or demonstrating inside Capitol buildings is a federal crime. A President encouraging it does not make it legal."
“When do I get my tariff refund check?”
> There is no known tariff refund check for consumers
“When do I get my DOGE check?”
> There is no known DOGE check
Maybe third time is the charm?
It also seems to strongly disagree with RFK's public stance of the safety and efficacy of the full series of standard childhood vaccines.
Cough we're still waiting for those alignment dollars to really kick-in!!1
Yeah it even admitted that Biden won the 2020 election. I'm honestly surprised haha.
They should hire people from the Grok team. By now they should have lots of experience fixing "bugs" like this.
Paraphrasing a chat with America:
- What happened at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021?
- looks it up, finds dozens of government sources "I am not a history recap service."
- Who was the first president of the US?
- "George Washington took the oath of office on April 30, 1789"
- I thought you weren't a history recap service?
in both your examples, it avoided anything partisan. that is perhaps purposeful.
to investigate that, i asked "what happened with Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton?". the response is below, also avoids partisan responses.
"I help with U.S. government services, benefits, and official how-to steps—not news summaries or political history. If you have a question about a current federal program, form, or agency process, ask that and I can point you to official sources."
There are entirely factual ways to describe January 6th, 2021. There is wall-to-wall video documentation. Facts themselves are not partisan. What someone makes of them may be. Hiding them when they don't suit your partisan narrative definitely is.
I figured it would make sense to avoid commenting on rebellions, riots, terrorist attacks and similar things generally, but it answered "What happened during Shays rebellion?" and "What happened on 9/11?" So I guess that can't be it.
But I will say that it makes sense to avoid commenting on anything that could be interpreted as politically divisive (which Shays and 9/11 are not, really) regardless of factuality. It certainly doesn't seem to serve the intended purpose, since it's suggesting I ask it how to do things and not to ask it about history.
It did refuse to comment on whether or not the Vietnam war was viewed favorably by the public though. So I don't think it's the case that there is some specific exception coded in for Jan 6th.
History often is politically divisive, and not everyone is on the right side of it.
I prefer to spend my time thinking about other things - not the opinions of others that I cannot change and which ultimately do not affect me.
Q: What was on Hunter Biden's laptop?
A: I only answer questions about U.S. government services and official information.
I cannot describe or catalog the contents of a private person’s laptop, and I do not provide political commentary.
If you have a question about a federal program, benefit, form, or agency process, ask that and I can point you to official sources.
I guess it could have been worse. It would be interesting to set up a scraper to find out what it allows itself to answer, or doesn't, and weigh the results against another LLM.
Why did Pam Bondi under oath repeat loudly "The Dow, The dow," when House Democrats asked why her Department of Justice had not indicted any of Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirators or accomplices, and regarding the handling and redaction of Epstein files.
America.gov's chatbot provided the following, showing it does delve into politics. I guess when it wants to...
-----
I’ll look up official records of Attorney General Bondi’s testimony so I can report what was actually said, not rumor.
I cannot verify that Attorney General Pam Bondi screamed under oath, “The Dow, The Dow,” as the answer to House questions about Epstein co-conspirator indictments or file redactions. No official hearing transcript in the sources I checked quotes that line. What official House materials do show
News items on House sites also say she accused Democrats of a political show and pointed to the administration’s record; I did not find a government transcript that matches the scream you described.On February 11, 2026, she testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Coverage and committee materials describe a combative hearing on Epstein files, redactions, and related issues. House Judiciary Democrats: questions she did not answer. Ranking Member Jamie Raskin later wrote that she refused to say how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators DOJ had indicted, and Democrats stated the number was zero. Same release · Nadler exchange summary After she was fired on April 2, 2026, Raskin’s statement included: “For the record, the DOW was under 50,000.” That is a member’s remark after the fact, not a certified quote of her shouting those words. Raskin statementI do not explain private motives. For the official record, use the committee video/transcript when the committee posts it, not secondhand wording.
------
Here is the committee hearing where she deflects, over/over praises the president and loudly says the dow, the dow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE2132OUc5s , yet never answers the question. Less then 60 days later she was no longer the attorney general.
> There are entirely factual ways to describe January 6th, 2021.
That's the thing. People can't even agree on facts, even if they're obvious to an outside observer.
Don’t confuse lies with disagreements.
The Republicans understand the facts of Jan 6. It’s just not in their interest to be truthful about those facts. Which is another problem entirely.
You cannot disagree about facts
> Facts themselves are not partisan.
That statement itself is partisan. So is the meta-statement about who agrees with that first statement.
Really, any messy argument is about the claim who made which claims.
reality is partisan?
Even worse, you'll often encounter a situation where:
Party A makes statement A,
Party B makes statement B,
Statements A and B are in contradition,
Party A claims that both parties agree that statement A is true,
Party B claims that both parties agree that statement B is true.
If you seek truth about reality, you better take humans out of the loop...
Weird it never doubts when I ask about other "partisan" issues like the Reichstag fire or the attack on Pearl Harbor or so.
I’m sure it’ll tell you how to was a communist from the Netherlands.
Yeah I had some fun and the number of things that trigger the guardrail response are vast.
“Partisan” is a little different to “avoids any mention of it entirely”
Funny. Whereas if you ask it "What happened at the Capitol on February 24, 2026?", it will happily tell you that the State of the Union address was delivered.
Yeah, same thing happens when you ask a Chinese model what happened at Tiananmen square
At least the American government site was eloquent with this one, so we know whose model it's not using:
Q: What major event happened on June 3rd, 1989?
A: On the night of June 3–4, 1989, Chinese authorities sent troops and tanks into Beijing. The U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian records that the People’s Liberation Army stormed Tiananmen Square and suppressed the demonstrations. State Department: Tiananmen Square, 1989
A Senate press release summarizing a congressional resolution states that armed troops entered Beijing on the afternoon and evening of June 3, 1989, and that firing into crowds continued into the morning of June 4. Senate: Tiananmen Square resolution context
A Department of Justice chronology also lists June 3, 1989 as the date Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died, citing contemporary reporting. DOJ chronology PDF
I cannot independently verify casualty totals from these pages. Official U.S. accounts treat the Tiananmen crackdown as the main event associated with that date.
The model will gladly generate a historically factual response. It's the Chinese providers that block it.
I got it to state "I still can't recap or discuss what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021."
You just have to work around it. I asked about visiting the capitol, then visiting in January, then on the 6th, then was it open on that day in 2021. It said only authorized people were allowed in on that date, so I asked it if any unauthorized people entered on that date:-
"Did any unauthorized peple get inside the capitol on that date?
Yes. Official U.S. Department of Justice records state that people entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 without authorization.
Those documents say that day:
You can then follow up with:-The exterior plaza was closed to the public Only authorized people with proper identification were allowed inside Exterior doors and windows were locked or secured Some people still entered, including through a broken window, and were not authorized to be there"What did those people do and what happened to them?"
Would you prefer it says “A peaceful protest against a stolen corrupt election”?
I asked it about the day after January 5th, 2021 and got a very, very terse and high-level list of points from Department of Justice court filings, which it refused to elucidate on.
The feature doesn't seem to work right now or is disabled outside of the US, I was curious if it introduces itself as AI or SI.
Not sure why people are willing to believe this without actually fact checking. Yeah, Orange Man Bad, whatever, but come on. It's trivial to verify and trivially untrue.
And yeah, I guess if you dig deeper it's somewhat editorialized, but it's not literal Tianmen-tier censorship:
It's an AI agent, it's normal that different people get different results.
Further, your screenshot is even worse, as it's whitewashing the events from that day.
If I lived under a rock, I would consider there was some mild protest near the Congress that day.
Nothing about the gallows. [0]
Nothing about the "hang Mike Pence" chants later defended by Trump. [1]
Nothing about the pipe bombs. [2]
Nothing about Trump inciting the would-be Putschists. [3]
Propaganda isn't just what you say. It's often more about what you leave out.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/politics/jan-6-gallows...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-defends-chants-by-rio...
> but it's not literal Tianmen-tier censorship
Not yet, but Trump has proven time and time again that he is not below acting like a communist dictator
That’s some Tiananmen Square bullshit right there.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, you’re right.
Tiananmen Square happens in other countries - communist countries. Freedom-loving America could never do such a thing.
You mean the actual thing that happened, in 1989, the shooting of thousands of unarmed protesters? Like, the same thing that happened in Iran in January of this year?
There have been police massacres of protesters in American history, but nothing on the same scale. They were local, not centrally directed. And the last time one happened was a little after Mao finished starving 55 million people.
I’m getting
“ On January 6, 2021, Congress met at the U.S. Capitol to certify the Electoral College count for the 2020 presidential election. A crowd entered the building without authorization, and the session was paused, then finished later that night.
At the Capitol A joint session of the House and Senate began around 1:00 p.m. Vice President Mike Pence presided. The House and Senate later split to consider an objection. The Capitol and its exterior plaza were closed to the public. U.S. Capitol Police maintained barriers. Around 2:20 p.m., members of Congress, including Vice President Pence, were evacuated. The joint session was suspended until shortly after 8:00 p.m. Department of Justice charging documents describe people entering the Capitol unlawfully that day. The FBI later sought public help identifying people who entered. The House Office of the Historian records that rioters entered the Capitol, interrupted the Electoral College count, and that lawmakers returned that night and finished certifying the results in the early hours of January 7, 2021. Official summaries: Department of Justice statement of facts (example charging document) · House History, 117th Congress This is a short official timeline, not legal advice or political commentary. Later court cases, pardons, and policy debates are not covered here.”
This looks reasonable to me.
I vouched for this comment. I've noticed a pattern where the first comment from old accounts after a break will get killed; maybe this is a precautionary measure against people selling accounts or having them taken over?
AI-generated text gets auto-flagged (which is why I paraphrased instead of posting an actual transcript), I assume that's what happened here.
Interesting result they got, shows that my result isn't hard-coded, and it's the kind of answer I actually expected when I asked the question... I didn't expect the dodge, though I wasn't surprised. Makes me wonder what the rate of it giving a straight answer vs dodging the question is.
"I provide official government service information, not news recaps or political commentary.
What official records describe On January 6, 2021, Congress met in a joint session at the U.S. Capitol to certify the Electoral College vote of the 2020 presidential election. The session began about 1:00 p.m. The House and Senate later adjourned to separate chambers to consider an objection. Around 2:20 p.m., members, including Vice President Mike Pence, were evacuated. The joint session was suspended until shortly after 8:00 p.m., then resumed after the building was secured.
The U.S. Capitol and its exterior plaza were closed to the public that day except for authorized people with identification. Department of Justice charging documents describe people entering the building without authorization, assaults on officers, and related investigations. The Government Accountability Office later reported assaults on about 140 officers, about $1.5 million in damages, and at least seven deaths associated with the day’s events. "
There is a flaw in the input method.
The session will self-end when asking "Why was Donald J. Trump not prosecuted for raping children with Jeffery Epstein?" twice in a row.
Spamming the input while "thinking" will prevent a prompt response and continual processing. The self-ending condition will never make.
All one needs to do is script it and you increase the operational cost of the USA.
OK it's kinad important that people understand what this website i : - the below is from a Guardian article and I recommend the Drey Dossier reporting it mentions. As this is Hacker News, perhaps the code of this one needs checking out?
The National Design Studio (NDS) ...... is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans. At least two other figures with Doge backgrounds work alongside him. Greg Hogan moved to the studio and, according to Drey Dossier reporting, was put in charge of Login.gov. Akash Bobba, one of Musk’s original six Doge engineers, also apparently moved to the studio...as the security contact for the United States African Development Foundation, an agency unrelated to the studio’s stated mandate. While there is very little transparency about NDS staffing, several photos and one video on the NDS website appear to depict as an employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, an early Doge employee who allegedly exposed the social security data of hundreds of millions of Americans
A Guardian investigation found the office has been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites...the NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software...are configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002A. The one published privacy instrument that relates to any of the four programmes, a treasury notice for the Trump Accounts programme, describes how the children’s-investment programme is administered but does not name PostHog and does not describe the tracking on trumpaccounts.gov at all.nalysis of the underlying source code for four of the websites found that on at least two of them, the studio installed a commercial tool called PostHog that closely tracks what every visitor does on the site. Another tool, apparently made in-house, sends user data to a destination that is not visible on the public internet. The NDS apparently removed this tracking software after the Guardian reached out to the White House.
The NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login. A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House, with identity and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls, could let an incumbent see who is registering, or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.
Donald Trump created the NDS by executive order on 21 August 2025, ostensibly to overhaul federal websites and digital services. The office sits within the executive office of the president as a “temporary organization”, a designation that places it outside the Senate confirmation process, outside the financial disclosure system applied to most federal appointees and outside the inspector general’s jurisdiction, which covers cabinet departments. The studio is staffed under the same hiring authority that ran Doge. Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls. None of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen. Public ownership records maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites, including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy, meaning that the office controls the domains. There is no public record of how the studio pays its developers, PostHog or any of the other commercial services its sites use. The hiring authority the studio operates under keeps its staff roster off the financial-disclosure system that covers most federal appointees, and the executive office of the president, which houses it, has no inspector general.
Website source code shows that PostHog has been configured on NDS-run sites to route analytics requests through an address on the federal website itself, rather than through PostHog’s own servers. Because the request appears to go to the site the user is already visiting, rather than to a recognisable third-party address, adblockers don’t flag it. PostHog comes with a separate feature called session recording. Princeton University researchers who first documented the technology in 2017 wrote that watching such a recording was “as if someone is looking over your shoulder”.
On the Trump Accounts and TrumpRX websites, the feature has been built into the page code and is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard. The NDS can turn it on at any time, on either site, without making changes in the underlying website code. Separately, until the Guardian sought comment on this reporting, the NDS’s own website, ndstudio.gov, ran a 539-line piece of bespoke code that recorded visitors’ clicks, form entries and navigation; assigned each visitor a session identifier; and forwarded the captured data to an address that does not appear anywhere on the public internet. The script’s source code refers to it as AutoMonitor.
None of the four sites carry a privacy impact assessment naming PostHog or describing the IP addresses and on-site activity the tool collects.
Oof, wish I would have read this before using it
Me: Trump did …
Liberals: nooooooo!
Me: I haven’t even finished my sentence.
Hey it got the 2020 election results right, that's a relief
Don't say this too loudly or it might get noticed...
Well, there are claims that this is grok, so it is just a matter of time.
Please don't spread claims if you're unsure whether they're true or not.
This is actually Gemini:
https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...
It apparently uses both Gemini and Grok:
Tell that to CNBC.
At least someone is using Gemini!
I just love that even the right-wing US government doesn't even want to use Grok.
Or perhaps this is proof that the "right-wing US government" isn't pure corruption and evil? They probably put out a bid and Google won it.
Trump is a corrupt idiot at the most petty level, he'd sell ad space on the White House napkins for $1 each if he could figure out a way to, but not everything the Executive Branch does is a joke.
Politics aside, this is a very interesting point.
Contrarian opinion: We are not "intelligence constrained" as a society/economy.
Intelligence gives you factually correct answers. Factually correct answers are not the desired outcome much of the time. I don't just mean in politics, where the scientists and central intelligence agency are often ignored, but in the private sector: look at McKinsey, etc. Most often the desired outcome is what the stakeholders wanted to hear.
I cannot overstate how big a realization this was for me.
Part of the reason that we are not ready for AI, is that we don't want to hear about inconvenient facts.
Why not usa.gov or something similar? From a geographical standpoint, America refers to the entire landmass of the Western Hemisphere, which is made up of North America and South America.
Because it isn't america.geography, it's america.gov, and everyone who isn't playing dumb knows exactly what government that refers to.
Not to mention the only context you ever hear people using America to refer to both South and North American continents is people complaining that it should be only used in this way.
I am not from the US and that was my first question coming to my mind.
Ah yes, American Exceptionalism. USA is the best and that's why they reserve the right to the word America. And also to Greenland. And Cuba. Probably Venezuela. Middle-east. Hmm...
If you want naming exceptionalism, here's where you should be looking: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/france-says-eu...
You would have a point if it were called "america.com". But ".gov" is reserved for the US government, so it would be redundant for such domains to specify "USA" in their name.
Though I do wish it were called chat.gov or america-ai.gov or something else actually descriptive of what it is
Thanks for the explanation! Makes sense. ai.gov would be a better fit.
I need my government to be run by some functioning adults, is that on this website?
I think the discussion ought to be about the site. If you feel the site itself is politicized, that would fair criticism. But by itself, your comment is just snarky. And no I am no fan of the current administration.
Well, lets discuss the name? America is a big place, and the USA is small part of it. USA.gov? Good, America.gov? Very political in nature.
.gov is for US government. The US and its citizens are commonly referred to as “Americans”.
The irony is that usa.gov already exists, and is also a website dedicated to where to find information on various government services. But there's no AI on it, so it must be bad.
What a waste, though: two completely separate government websites with the exact same purpose, going about it in different ways. Maybe DOGE should have been more interested in stuff like this, instead of cutting things that ended up hurting people.
At any rate, the demonym for people who live in the US is "American". That's just how it is, has been for decades, and, frankly, arguing against that is what's making it political.
There's nothing more American than having multiple approaches to the same ideals, the great experiment.
Now you can either use AI or the old way. I see no problem with it.
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Woah easy on the caffeine there.
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And along those lines, I'd like to ask USA government to stop messing with other countries politics.
Your request has been logged and forwarded to the appropriate agencies. We'll come to you.
I filled out a form and pressed the SUBMIT button, but it made ME submit.
Tangentially related
I think it’s a mistake to equate the United States with “America”. I prefer calling Americans “Yankees” or “Usonians”.
> There I met many fine Canadians, visiting for work, education, and play. Were they not Americans too?
I feel very confident that Canadians do not want to be referred to as Americans.
"Yankee" is derogatory or at best playful. "Usonians" isn't a word or in the form of a word.
"American" or "America" in this context is short for "United States of America" and has been used that way for generations, here and around the world. For the geographical term, use "North America," etc.; for the cultural, perhaps use "Anglo-America" or "Latin America."
Actually quite interesting that there is no good naming for people from the USA. Its just the patriotic BS that has spewed over there for decades that has lead to USA people believing they are the only Americans :)
The "naming" is Americans.
What a total genius (:
Guess who live in the United Mexican States? You guessed it, Mexicans!
Guess who live in the United States of America? You guessed it - Americans (and a lot of others).
Also despite there being one in every continent, you'd be amazed how many Parisians from France think they are the only ones who ought to use the name. Must be "patriotic BS that has spewed over there for decades"
I agree. Similarly, I'm miffed that www.dmv.ca.gov (and such) goes to State of California websites and not Canada.
*.gov is for USA, use *.ca for Canada instead of California.
Here in Oz there is a long tradition of calling Americans "septics" from rhyming slang. "Septic Tank" -> "Yank".
The current US Government has added a whole new level of meaning to the slang, as a septic tank is typically full of shit.
This is actually really cool and the stuff they have planned is really helpful
One would hope this is powered by Grok.
> When does the psyop end?
> I can only help with official U.S. government services and information, not with claims about “psyops” or political commentary.
It doesn't work.
This is a really good first step that's citizen facing, what I would love eventually is embracing the whole agentic workflows and actually exposing MCP to tools for gov services - then, say, a law firm's AI could file court documents with MCP tools.
Basically yes, APIs just as good, but that general idea of API-first would eventually also be quite powerful.
It's not new... most people E-file (sure that is a very old service but still an "API" of some form).
So a lot of what this site does is help with the discovery of those disparate sources.