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Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap (themarkup.org)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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In a press conference this week on New York City’s $12 billion budget gap, Mayor Zohran Mamdani zeroed in on the previous administration’s artificial intelligence chatbot as one of “a number of different things we’re going to pursue for savings.”

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[–] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It was costing the administration around half a million dollars.

How? Surely this was put in place as a cost cutting measure. I mean, terminate it, sure. Pay actual humans. I just have questions.

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  • [–] 42 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Often the promised cost savings never materialise, because when the chatbot fucks up, it's humans who need to clean up the mess.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    Now that you mention it, there was that story about Air Canada’s chatbot misleading a customer which ended up costing them $800. 😔

    Edit: I know, legal fees and such, but there didn’t appear to be any punitive component nor incentive to change course.

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  • [+] -8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    it's short sighted, because an ai chat bot that can answer basic surface level questions 24/7 should absolutely be more cost effective than having staff field the same questions. You can have half of them be the escalation point and assign different work to the other half. For the population of NYC this is the right approach.

    However I would accept that the previous administration was corrupt and overpaid an incompetent contractor. Mamdani should restart the project, not scrap it.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago

    The only way a chatbot can accurately answer basic level questioning is if staff has put in time to do the documentation. If they have, you frequently don't even need the chatbot because simple web searches will show up the question and answer or one of the major chatbots will have already indexed the documentation and can answer the question for free.

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