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...

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.

And people take chatbots as authoritative already.

> 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...

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.

The company can easily just get sued.

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...

I dunno, I believe that everyone is worthy of thriving and that requires education.

We'd be better off with naive people than monsters like you in my opinion.

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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?

At least as I see it, it would be just as unacceptable for a "normal" government website to be dangerously outdated.

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.

Yeah that's a fair point. We shouldn't have to rely on private companies for this kind of thing.

On the other hand this is just going through one or more of the big AI companies anyway. So they still get data from users, now we're just funding them with our taxes instead of using one of many LLM interfaces available for free.

The privacy policy actually looks OK though, I'll be interested to see what the EFF has to say.

I’m a bit torn on that matter. I haven’t looked into it, but I suspect it’s not some kind of specialized foundational model trained to be a federal agent.

It’s likely just a mask of either ChatGPT and probably through some massively bloated, nepotistic federal contract. There may be some additional guidelines and instructions but it’s probably not RAG on anything that isn’t publicly slay accessible to any other model, even if it is hard limited to federal sites/domains.

In addition to what others have said, ChatGPT is also available free and without an account I believe. What are you more likely to think of when you have a question, your AI service you already use and have your information in and maybe even has access to your documents, or are you going to remember to go to America.gov for basic chat AI?

Frankly, it would be really interesting to benchmark it against the other models when it comes to accomplishing things related to the government, i.e. Which information is more accurate, useful, and actionable.

There’s also another matter I find a bit troubling depending on the nature of how this came about, it could also be something that creates an inextricable incumbency in whichever AI company is behind it, i.e., how Microsoft has become a kind of parasite on government and thereby on corporations for many decades now.

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.

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?

I very much doubt it's 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.

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> That's outside America's scope

We know, we know.

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What’s the implication here?

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.

They also don’t know what specific words to search for.