New York City's new Microsoft chatbot was set up to help business owners with their legal questions while traversing the city's bureaucratic nightmare.
But rather than helping businesses stay on the right side of the law, the chatbot is doing what chatbots do, issuing all kinds of insane business advice.
Have a woman complaining about being sexually harassed?
Fire her!
Have a pregnant woman that you don't want to pay maternity leave for?
Fire her!
Same goes for people that won't shave their dreadlocks.
Who needs ‘em?
The best one was the restaurant that asked if they could still serve cheese to their customers after it had been nibbled on by rodents.
Absolutely!
There were others like using black bags for trash instead of bins or not being required to compost and recycle, but most of those laws in New York City are ridiculous. It's hard to fault a chatbot for being less insane than the bureaucrats who made the laws in the first place.
Even though any business following these directives will end up fined, sued, or worse, Mayor Eric Adams says the chatbot is here to stay!
"Anyone that knows technology knows this is how it's done," he said. "Only those who are fearful sit down and say, ‘Oh, it is not working the way we want, now we have to run away from it all together.' I don't live that way."
But the city government has at least attempted to cover its own rear end by adding a disclaimer to the chatbot:
It may "occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased" information and the caveat, since-strengthened, that its answers are not legal advice.
Experts call the move irresponsible and dangerous.
Jevin West, a professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, said that using these models for public agencies is especially problematic.
"There's a different level of trust that's given to government," West said. "Public officials need to consider what kind of damage they can do if someone was to follow this advice and get themselves in trouble."
Suresh Venkatasubramanian, the director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign at Brown University, warned,
It should make cities think about why they want to use chatbots, and what problem they are trying to solve. If the chatbots are used to replace a person, then you lose accountability while not getting anything in return.
The City's embrace of a large-language model AI being used for legal advice remains a cautionary tale for other cities looking to save a couple of bucks on staff.
But at least we now have an idea where state attorney General Letitia James and Justice Arthur Engoron came up with their case and the excessive fines they leveled against Donald Trump.
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