ChatGPT flagged HVAC grant as DEI | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT flagged HVAC grant as DEI

fortune.com

5 pointsmotbus38 comments

Let's take off politics out of the discussion. In those sort of situations, how it can be fixed.

If someone promoted a coin flip mechanism to cut costs and caused problems, would anyone be responsible for that? I would like to understand the next steps if anyone knows

This is very clearly the “A computer can never be held accountable therefor a computer should never make a management decision” problems.

ChatGPT didn’t make this decision, the person who decided to vibe-govern did.

That being said, it feels like this could have been improved with adversarial agents. Have nother agent check the reasoning of the first agent. Or just even a script looking for keywords.

Even given the low bar they set for themselves, they failed to meet it.

But it's 100% politics. The question is who gets government grant money. It's determined by the priorities of the people in charge, plus some luck if there are lots of good applications. Every decision made is a political decision, and every result is a politically-motivated result.

To me, it seems that I clearly meant that I don't want a political decision and not that this is not related to political decision.

For example, people that have been cut from their jobs, or damages done while maintenance was suspended, etc... There were consequences. And this work was mostly done by a quickly assembled 3rd party company or individual. My question is, even if it was not ai, a d even if it was intentional or not, is there anything that can be done to repair and avoid this from happening again? It seems to me, quite an absurd, that no one can/will be held accountable for so many blunt mistakes.

Oh I see, you mean undoing what's been done. Lawsuits seem to be effective sometimes, even if they are slower and the results are incomplete. The reversal of tariffs, for example. A judge just ruled that the DoD policy that removed a bunch of reporters out of the press pool was illegal. So for these grants, I guess the applicants who were denied could use this evidence to say that they were denied a fair selection process, maybe claw back some of the money that was going to other people, and demand a second review. Actually getting consequences for the people who did this would be a separate set of lawsuits I think.

Yes. That's what I mean. Constitution means nothing if it needs to be fixed retroactively. Specially if there is the possibility a strategy of acting faster than the law.

For example, some countries may open an impeachment process against the acting chair if they are found to not be respecting the constitution.

In some of those places. It is not a matter if it was done on purpose or not, it is a matter of not being planned to avoid the problem.

It worked much better 10/20 years ago than now, but technically, the system is there. It does not work well today because there is no real opposition to the government to trigger the mechanism, although eventually they flag it in order to keep some level power over the government.

Unfortunately, it has been practice of the current government to create and give away positions as ministers for the challenging parties to settle things down, and as expected, it became a exchange coin.

I don't want to dox myself, hence I am not naming the place.

It's possible for the Senate to impeach Trump rapidly, but they have decided not to. That means almost every other action is retroactive. Here's another one that's moving ahead, but slowly. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/all-of-doges-wor...

There are various laws that prevent capricious government decisions. People can sue to halt the application of particular capricious processes. As to whether you can sue the government for damages, this depends on whether there is a law expressly permitting this, which I doubt.

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