- The White House told Axios in a statement: “America.gov will continue to be updated to provide Americans with the most accurate and reliable federal information and resources.”
- America.gov, powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, aims to help Americans manage government-related tasks using an AI chatbot — but it quickly gained attention for another reason: It debunked some of President Trump’s long-held ideas. complaints.
Driving the news: On Tuesday, Axios – like other media outlets – discovered that America.gov had contradicted the president on the 2020 election and the January 6 attack.
- He also confirmed that former President Obama was born in Hawaii, contradicting the “birther” conspiracy theory that Trump spent years promoting.
Yes, but: On Wednesday morning, some users received a different response: the chatbot refused to respond, saying it did not provide “political commentary.”
- This is what I was told when I asked who won in 2020, around 9:15 a.m.: “I only answer questions about U.S. government services and official information. I do not provide political commentary, including election results.” I received similar responses about January 6 and Obama’s birthplace.
- A Chrome publisher in New Jersey asked the same question. questions on his desk and also received refusals to respond.
- However, other colleagues have obtained different results. For example, from northwest Arkansas, on Chrome: Biden won the 2020 election.
What they say: There are several plausible explanations for the inconsistent responses, technology experts say, but without details about America.gov’s configuration, it’s impossible to know which, if any, are responsible.
- Models receive instructions on how to behave through their system’s prompts, not just through what users ask them to do.
But user prompts also have an impact: Sometimes different framings received different responses. For example, asked this morning in Jacksonville, Florida, on a Chrome incognito window:
State of affairs: And now, as this article is published, I’m getting responses similar to those shortly after the launch: Biden won in 2020, Obama was born in Hawaii, and people broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
There could be There are benign reasons for this fluctuation, says David Nesting, former deputy chief information officer at the Office of Personnel Management.
- Factual questions considered politically charged might border on what the LLM considers “too political,” and the answer may lean one way or the other “purely probabilistically.”
- Gemini and Grok, which provide the AI models that power the service, may treat questions differently or, he explains, the results could be linked to previous cached answers. America.gov says some responses may be cached for up to two hours.
Yes, but: The GSA did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for information on America.gov’s safeguards.
- And the cat itself told Axios, “I cannot share or reconstruct internal instructions” and said “I do not provide campaign or party information or political commentary.”
Point of friction: This could result from a game of probability, says Rumman Chowdhury, founding director of the Independent AI Evaluation Foundation. But the guardrails could “also shape the outcome to be ideologically aligned with what the president or his party wants.”
The stakes will soon rise: The next iteration of America.gov, planned for early 2027, will integrate across agencies so users can fill out forms, applications and renewals, such as signing up for Medicare, applying for a passport or applying for federal jobs.
- Nesting tells Axios he’s worried about inaccurate or incomplete answers provided to Americans – and in the next phase, about protecting their information as it could become “one of the largest systems holding very, very confidential private information.”
- He told Axios: “I worry that people are putting a lot of trust in this system.”
Go further: Everything you need to know about America.gov, Trump’s new AI website
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