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.
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...
To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
> To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
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.
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.
I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.
Can't say I've ever worked at a company whose knowledge base wasn't a complete shitshow full of broken links and outdated information. I expect the government will do a slightly better job.
A chatbot is only as good as the garbage data fed to it.
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.
We'd be better off with naive people than monsters like you in my opinion.
So the question is is the chat bot better than people trying to understand complicated government websites by themselves?
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.