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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.

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> 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.

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> 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...

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The US had something approaching that. It was considered waste, fraud, and abuse so had to go in the purge.
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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.

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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.
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People who care already have their words in the LLMs training data.
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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.

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The company can easily just get sued.
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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.

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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...
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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?
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At least as I see it, it would be just as unacceptable for a "normal" government website to be dangerously outdated.
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Perhaps. But that’s never been the law in the U.S. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/785/#tab-opi...
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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.

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Yes, but what AI powers the backend right now? Grok? Who's in charge of that and being paid for compute?
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I believe it's a mix of Gemini and Grok. They are probably providing the compute for free.
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I very much doubt it's free.
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And if it is, only on a limited basis. "The first one is free" does not just apply to drug dealers.
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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.
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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.

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What’s the implication here?
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>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.

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> on May 30, 2024, former President

So the cutoff date was somewhere around mid-2024?

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> That's outside America's scope

We know, we know.

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It's v1 - let's give them some grace
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This is an official website of the US government. There's zero reason to give grace here for a poor implementation, especially one that is meant to make services easier to find and use.
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I remember when Obama wore a tan healthcare.gov and he did NOT get this much grace
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> 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.

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People don't know that you can search for text within a page. They really do need the chatbot for that.
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They also don’t know what specific words to search for.
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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.
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