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NYC's Government Chatbot Is Lying About City Laws and Regulations

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NYC's "MyCity" ChatBot was rolled out as a "pilot" program last October. The announcement touted the ChatBot as a way for business owners to "save ... time and money by instantly providing them with actionable and trusted information from more t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NYC's "MyCity" ChatBot was rolled out as a "pilot" program last October. MyCity's Microsoft Azure-powered chatbot uses a complex process of statistical associations across millions of tokens to essentially guess at the most likely next word in any given sequence, without any real understanding of the underlying information being conveyed. NYC Office of Technology and Innovation Spokesperson Leslie Brown told The Markup that the bot "has already provided thousands of people with timely, accurate answers" and that "we will continue to focus on upgrading this tool so that we can better support small businesses across the city."

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