Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to enact what some experts have called the “largest job cut in American history“—but don’t worry, these geniuses have a solution to pick up the significant amount of slack caused by letting go of tens of thousands of domain experts and civil servants all at once: a chatbot.
According to Wired, DOGE has given about 1,500 employees at the US General Services Administration, the agency that manages federal real estate and oversees most government contracts, access to a proprietary chatbot called GSAi. That’s right, the agency that has already lost hundreds of employees to termination or resignation, including basically everyone working at its extremely efficient tech hub known as 18F, is getting ChatGPT in a suit that matches federal dress code to make up for all that lost labor.
GSAi, which was apparently rushed out the door by DOGE with the intention of deploying it across the entire agency, is supposed to support staff with “general” tasks. In an internal memo obtained by Wired, GSA employees were told that when it comes to what they can use GSAi for, “the options are endless.” It then offered a list of tasks that, frankly, ended very quickly: “You can: draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.”
Employees were also given a pretty major caveat about how they can use GSAi: no nonpublic information or “controlled unclassified information”—information that is sensitive but not classified—can be shared with it. That’s an understandable but pretty limiting disclaimer, especially if an employee wants to use the chatbot to, say, summarize meeting notes or help structure some data. Fittingly, a GSA employee told Wired the chatbot is “about as good as an intern,” and it produces “Generic and guessable answers.”
It’s noteworthy that GSAi was in development before Musk and company showed up. In fact, the GSA had been working with a number of agencies to develop chatbot-like interfaces, per Wired. The Department of Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services were both in talks to deploy chatbots both internally and for outward-facing platforms, and the Department of Education was also working with the GSA on a chatbot project designed for “support purposes” within the agency.
Those chatbots had not been deployed on account of being “janky,” per one employee. So, of course, DOGE just went ahead and rolled that thing out to people. Also, it seemed like the intention of those projects were to build a tool that could help facilitate employee work, not replace thousands of staff who were abruptly cut. In the case of the GSA, it’s likely that at least some of the people let go are the very ones who were building the GSAi tool that is now being deployed in their wake. Something tells me their skills are more useful than a chatbot that can draft an email.
Read the full article here
