In recent months, Elon Musk’s DOGE has attempted to hollow out America’s federal bureaucracy. After firing droves of workers and attempting to downsize prominent agencies, the billionaire-backed effort is attempting to create a new governance model that prioritizes automation.
On Friday, Wired reported that, in a flailing attempt to modernize the agency, a new ChatGPT-style bot was integrated into agency staffers’ workflows.
The Agency Support Companion is supposed to “assist employees with everyday tasks and enhance productivity,” an internal email viewed by the magazine reads. However, the chatbot does not seem to work very well. “Honestly, no one has really been talking about it at all,” a source who works at the agency told Wired.
At work I was recently told to watch a “training video” about AI that was made entirely with AI. Nobody seemed to get the irony of a video, made for humans, more or less made by an AI, on why you should use a different AI (we don’t have access to the video making tools). We’re basically gaslighting ourselves.
Except anyone watching that video would likely be convinced of the opposite.