What happens now if someone uses traditional search and comes across an outdated wiki or Confluence page with outdated/wrong/bad instructions, or interprets something incorrectly?

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thephyber an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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BalinKing 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At least as I see it, it would be just as unacceptable for a "normal" government website to be dangerously outdated.

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rayiner 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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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BalinKing 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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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rayiner 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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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gusgus01 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think "unacceptable" is different than "not illegal".

	▲	rayiner an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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?

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mpyne 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, you're going to be in for a shock about how many government websites are in an unacceptable state.

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Spooky23 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.