From the Los Angeles Times:
John McGing couldn’t reach a human. That might be business-as-usual in this economy, but it wasn’t business; he had called the Social Security Administration, where the questions often aren’t generic and the callers tend to be older, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable Americans.
McGing, calling on behalf of his son, had an in-the-weeds question: how to prevent overpayments that the federal government might later claw back. His call was intercepted by an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.
No matter what he said, the bot parroted canned answers to generic questions, not McGing’s obscure query. “If you do a key press, it didn’t do anything,” he said. Eventually, the bot “glitched or whatever” and got him to an agent.
It was a small but revealing incident. Unbeknownst to McGing, a former Social Security employee in Maryland, he had encountered a technological tool recently introduced by the agency. Former officials and longtime observers of the agency say the Trump administration rolled out a product that was tested but deemed not yet ready during the Biden administration. …
In interviews with KFF Health News, people who left the agency — some speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Trump administration and its supporters — said they believe the new administration simply rushed out technologies developed, but deemed not yet ready, by the Biden administration. They also said the agency’s firing of thousands of employees resulted in the loss of experienced technologists who are best equipped to roll out these initiatives and address their weaknesses. …
Agency leaders and employees who first worked on the AI product during the Biden administration anticipated those types of difficulties. Escobar-Alava said they had worked on such a bot, but wanted to clean up the policy and regulation data it was relying on first.
“We wanted to ensure the automation produced consistent and accurate answers, which was going to take more time,” she said. Instead, it seems the Trump administration opted to introduce the bot first and troubleshoot later, Escobar-Alava said. …
10 comments:
On the road to privatization.
That is how it has gone for everything. Blow it up and then figure it out. A phrase we have heard executives say is they are trying to rebuild the airplane while it is flying.
So it doesn’t surprise me that they would release the chat bot and then figure out how to use it. I honestly think the touting that AI is helping 90% of the calls is actually 85% people getting frustrated and hanging up and only 5% actually getting the help they sought.
Former SSA employee here. This is not an uncommon event. I spent 30+ years at the agency (retired 2021) and during that time on numerous occasions the agency rolled out new technology, programs, policies, etc. that weren't ready for primetime. With variously negative results. So in fairness I don't think this can be blamed solely on the current administration.
There’s an internal AI bot employees are suppose to use and it can’t answer the most basic policy questions. It’s actually worse than if you just googled the question. It often provides answers that are not even close or have nothing to do with SSA policy.
This administration is trying everything under the sun to destroy this agency by reducing the workforce in record numbers. There is a difference between trial and error and outright malfeasance.
Not 3:05 - Was gonna add that 95% of the time that SSA rolled out tech that wasn't ready for primetime it was internal facing not public facing. Now I'd wonder about programs and policies that were rolled out and taken back, I honestly don't recall any in almost 40 years there but could be. And software updates sometimes needed emergency fixes but again, not public facing. But usually public facing stuff was pretty stable or fixed on an emergency basis. But this chatbot, speaking from experience, was horrible.
If SSA blocked Google from being used by employees production would plummet. Google was always my first choice for research. It would take far too long to find the answer on SSA approved online sources.
Maybe the agency is blocking this news blog.
I'm not a fan of IVR, but this seems manufactured. He's calling to ask how to prevent SSA OPs for this son? That's something you just google.
Isn’t that your job to answer questions? Maybe, Mr. Google should replace you.
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