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maherbeg • today at 3:43 PM • 10 replies • view on HN

OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.


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why_at • today at 10:58 PM

I can see how LLMs might be useful for this kind of thing but I'm struggling to think of how this will be better than just asking ChatGPT the same questions.

The first suggestion I saw was "I just got married, how do I change my last name?"

It tells you to update your Social Security info first and gives you some helpful links.

ChatGPT tells me the same things with some of the same links. It didn't even have to ask if I was in America because it found my state based off my IP I assume.

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gthrow12345 • today at 5:47 PM

I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance? People being lead astray with information from the government could lead to very serious consequences, up to and including imprisonment.

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.

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schainks • today at 8:54 PM

Yes, but what AI powers the backend right now? Grok? Who's in charge of that and being paid for compute?

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sippingabonedry • today at 10:50 PM

I threw some legitimate questions at it today and got helpful answers in response.

Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.

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zephyreon • today at 10:01 PM

The privacy policy is actually somewhat respectable too. https://america.gov/privacy-policy

I’m currently doing a deep dive on Rampart, their (allegedly) local PII filter.

oridb • today at 11:04 PM

This is what Google did for me before it got enshittified, but it did it efficiently and reliably.

jedbrooke • today at 9:19 PM

> If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.

I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.

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tombert • today at 9:11 PM

Yeah, I was curious if it was going to try and bombard me with a bunch of bullshit about how wonderful our glorious Trump godking is, but honestly the information it gave was reasonable enough.

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daveguy • today at 4:05 PM

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aprentic • today at 8:37 PM

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