| ▲ | rayiner a day ago |
| > 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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| ▲ | LelouBil a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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... |
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| ▲ | wingworks a day ago | parent | next [-] | | NZ does a pretty good job at it too: https://www.govt.nz/browse/family-and-whanau/having-a-baby/ | | |
| ▲ | dzhiurgis 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | doc_ick a day ago | parent | next [-] | | 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). | | |
| ▲ | irishcoffee 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | astafrig 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | irishcoffee 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | We must not live on the same planet. Most government websites are completely fucking useless here. It’s different where you’re from? | | |
| ▲ | lkbm 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Useless, perhaps, but generally say true things rather than false things, in my experience. |
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| ▲ | 5upplied_demand 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | dansquizsoft 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I, for one, completely agree with the statement that 'humans make things up all the time' (often non-maliciously) also |
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| ▲ | rayiner 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The concerns about hallucination are overstated. LLMs don’t hallucinate nearly as much as they used to. | | |
| ▲ | kijashdkujdfhas 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | rerdavies an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | delis-thumbs-7e 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | drstewart 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | >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. |
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| ▲ | LelouBil 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | rerdavies an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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! |
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| ▲ | tessierashpool a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | dash2 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't remember Britain having any online services before the web, what are you referring to? There was Ceefax.... | | |
| ▲ | Sophira 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | flir 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think that would be Prestel. The fact that you don't remember it probably tells you all you need to know... |
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| ▲ | consensus1 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | But why not just use a LLM? | | |
| ▲ | kulahan a day ago | parent [-] | | Cost, accuracy for the user, trustworthiness for the administrators, public perception, unknown future trajectory… |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One of the only things more dangerous than ignorance is false confidence. An official USG chatbot potentially makes things much worse. |
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| ▲ | kulahan a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Better remove humans from the equation, then. | | |
| ▲ | toofy a day ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | rerdavies an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | lkbm 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | toofy 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | lkbm 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > a bot that doesn’t learn | | |
| ▲ | toofy 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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” | | |
| ▲ | lkbm 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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.) |
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| ▲ | olmo23 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > humans can be held accountable and learn from their mistakes bad bots can be retrained or shut down far more easily | | |
| ▲ | dansquizsoft 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But in government humans are fired all the time! (Especially in mature western democracies) | |
| ▲ | toofy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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” | |
| ▲ | rapidaneurism 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | buriram a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | intended 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kulahan 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | >From which equation? I was referring to the government side, as a mild quip. |
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| ▲ | maxk42 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr a day ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | dukeyukey a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | rerdavies 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | dan-robertson a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | tokioyoyo a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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? |
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| ▲ | basscomm 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | latexr a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | stldev a day ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | BubbleRings a day ago | parent [-] | | 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! |
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| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | seb1204 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kulahan a day ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan a day ago | parent [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | kulahan 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | kulahan 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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! |
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| ▲ | seb1204 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | ct520 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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) | |
| ▲ | setsewerd 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | hatthew a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | GP is very clearly speaking for america? | |
| ▲ | buriram a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | deadbabe a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People who care already have their words in the LLMs training data. | |
| ▲ | godelski a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
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 |
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| ▲ | butlike 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | joemazerino a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And people take chatbots as authoritative already. |
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| ▲ | intended 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | braiamp a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > 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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| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau a day ago | parent [-] | | The US had something approaching that. It was considered waste, fraud, and abuse so had to go in the purge. |
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