Get the latest tech news

NYC’s government chatbot is lying about city laws and regulations

You can be evicted for not paying rent, despite what the "MyCity" chatbot says.

That tendency seems poised to cause some serious problems now that a chatbot run by the New York City government is making up incorrect answers to some important questions of local law and municipal policy. 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. But 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."

Get the Android app