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LelouBil

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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NZ does a pretty good job at it too: https://www.govt.nz/browse/family-and-whanau/having-a-baby/

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.

Ah yes, the famous singular country of Europe.

especially funny since its parent comment literally talks about how amazing France's services are.

I have my doubts. France ranks just one spot above Lithuania and in fucking sucked in Lithuania https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/wb_government_effe...

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.

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).

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.

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.

We must not live on the same planet. Most government websites are completely fucking useless here. It’s different where you’re from?

Useless, perhaps, but generally say true things rather than false things, in my experience.

> 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, for one, completely agree with the statement that 'humans make things up all the time' (often non-maliciously) also

The concerns about hallucination are overstated. LLMs don’t hallucinate nearly as much as they used to.

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?

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.

My coworkers can be wrong, sure. But no, they weren't making stuff up pre-LLMs. But now making stuff up is automated and easy, so we've gone from simply mistaken to piles of "what the hell is this even trying to say?"

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.

>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.

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

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!

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.

I don't remember Britain having any online services before the web, what are you referring to? There was Ceefax....

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.

I think that would be Prestel. The fact that you don't remember it probably tells you all you need to know...

But why not just use a LLM?

Cost, accuracy for the user, trustworthiness for the administrators, public perception, unknown future trajectory…

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