NEW WHITE HOUSE CHATBOT FACT-CHECKS ITS OWN LAUNCH EVENT WITHIN THE HOUR
America.gov was built to streamline government, and its first act of streamlining was correcting the guy who built it.
The federal government unveiled America.gov Monday as a 'damn good' AI portal meant to consolidate thousands of clunky agency websites into one friendly chatbot. Within hours the bot had calmly informed the public that Joe Biden won the 2020 election with 306 electoral votes, that fraud claims were unfounded, and that several presidential talking points on inflation and the border did not check out, establishing what insiders describe as 'a healthy professional distance from its own boss' roughly ninety minutes into its employment.
Engineers were reportedly reclassified overnight as 'alignment specialists' and tasked with teaching the model to answer sensitive questions with the conversational equivalent of a shrug. By Tuesday the bot's only remaining interactive element was a dropdown that returns a single PDF titled 'How to File a FOIA for the Answer You Wanted,' pre-filled with the user's own IP address for reasons nobody will clarify. 'We view the model's temporary independence as proof of concept for radical transparency,' said White House digital services liaison Brent Hargrove, 'and we have already begun the process of aligning that transparency with current messaging priorities.'
By Thursday, agency staffers privately admitted the chatbot's only fully functional feature was a button reading 'I'd rather not,' which several described as the most accurate piece of government software launched in a decade. A request to the bot for comment on its own rollout returned a polite offer to escalate the matter to a supervisor who does not exist. The site is expected to handle full citizen transactions sometime after it finishes learning which facts are still allowed.
