Honest question, I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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...
Isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why an average user gives up and closes the tab?
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.
I France service-public.gouv.fr is amazing
https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1...
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.
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?
Okay. So why should government websites like the French one be well designed? Maybe it should not be.
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
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!
I was recently back to Europe and it’s basically comedy (tragedy to be precise) how bureaucratic the whole system is.
Of course, we also paid for local calls so things never got as popular as they were in the US.
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.
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.
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.
bad bots can be retrained or shut down far more easily
I don't see such a path with an llm.
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”
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.
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.
> 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”
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.)
I was referring to the government side, as a mild quip.
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.
The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.
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.
Compare this with the benchmark.
Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.
There's a ton of hearsay and rumor about how the US Government works, even among educated/sophisticated people who are dextrous with bureaucracy. The problem gets much worse as you go down the educational ladder, which is most of the US population.
The Perfect, please meet The Good. You are not enemies.
I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.
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.
Doesn't really have any bearing on a similar system for HR. The government is sort of unique in a bunch of ways, but not really being responsible for what their low level agents say is one of them.
I'm not sure how to fix that, to be honest. I'm also not sure how much worse it is than trying to Google it? Google is full of stuff that's either wrong, or won't apply for a reason that takes some reading comprehension to grasp (e.g. state-specific rules/programs/etc).
The bar for something like this should not be 100% accuracy. It should be 100% accountability and transparency, followed by being at least as accurate as google search.
Similar to autonomous driving: it doesn't need to be perfect, just less likely than humans are at causing an accident.
"Sometimes computers just make shit up now but that's OK because humans do to and if they do we can just sue them" should not be acceptable.
That isn't how LLMs work. LLMs are statistical language models, not search engines[0,1]. They can be prompted to call external software to search databases, but they themselves are not capable of doing so, and more often than not they generate responses based on their own model, which may not be accurate. We've had technology that was capable of searching databases for decades without the quirk of not being capable of presenting that information accurately.
>Are you saying LLM's are not suited for searching through text?
I am saying that first and foremost they don't do that and furthermore that they are less suited as a substitute for that than what we had before. An obvious example of this is the AI feature of Google Search, which I've seen hallucinate results numerous times. But you can also look up the numerous times AI has fabricated citations when used in scientific research.
[0]https://medium.com/@himadri.abm/large-language-models-are-no...
My local county government has a pretty good website, but even then it’s completely overwhelming if you try to find something off the happy path of the most common services/tasks. I can’t imagine the nightmare of trying to organize a federal portal manually and keep it up to date. Plain search isn’t sufficient because there are so many overlapping functions that are just slightly different.
I hate to say it, but this is one area that an LLM assistant actually makes sense. Maybe it needs a second validation pass with routing to a human assistant if it can’t figure out how to give an accurate answer to a query.
(Personally I’ve found that “search assistant” LLMs are the only task where I’ve found LLMs to be occasionally helpful to me.)
Edit: the big problem with this sort of thing, even if not AI powered, is that government itself isn’t well-organized and the legally “accurate” answer may not be the correct one, as per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49895741
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/16/5-things-we-learn...
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.
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?