New America.gov demonstrates its "super intelligence" by responding to "play Minecraft" prompt with nervous breakdown

We will note, in the interest of fairness, that at least some of the issues we’re noting here have clearly had some hard caps put on them since stories about America.gov’s issues started circulating. But the screenshots and videos persist, including this Associated Press story where the AI’s reliance on publicly available facts ran counter to the Trump administration’s own ongoing war with reality. (Including stating authoritatively that there was no election tampering in 2020, that human-impacted climate change is real, and that the government department situated in the Pentagon is called the Department Of Defense.)

The really weird stuff didn’t happen, though, until some enterprising mind asked the AI to “play Minecraft.” At which point (per 404 Media), the chatbot began spitting a rambling, digressive story about dreams and awakenings that eagle-eyed readers eventually recognized as a civic-minded version of the esoteric poem that plays when you “beat” the Microsoft-owned sandbox game. (“Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.”)

Sadly, as we noted above, some killjoy at a keyboard has now pretty clearly hard-coded America.gov to no longer respond to requests to play games with sprawling paragraphs of free-form word jazz. Still, it’s a fun reminder that nobody’s actually stress-testing this stuff ahead of time, because why would they? Robot’ll fix it.