By Lucas Ropek
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.
The app’s launch was reportedly accompanied by a hilariously terrible training video (seen here) that involved a poorly animated, four-fingered woman. The video, which was supposed to explain to staffers how to use the app, neglected to tell them a very critical piece of information: that they should refrain from uploading sensitive personal information to the program. This oversight forced the agency to send out an apologetic email to staffers that highlighted the missing context: “Our apologies for the oversight in our training video,” it read.
“I’m not sure most of my coworkers even watched the training video,” the SSA source told Wired. “I played around with the chatbot a bit, and several of the responses I received from it were incredibly vague and/or inaccurate.” They added: “You could hear my coworkers making fun of the graphics. Nobody I know is [using it]. It’s so clumsy and bad.”
If Musk’s plan is to automate the SSA, there is plenty of evidence (aside from the terrible new app) that suggests it’s a bad idea. Indeed, a similar attempt at automating social services in Brazil shows why over-reliance on algorithms to operate welfare programs may result in worse outcomes for everybody.
Rest of the World reports that an attempt by the Brazilian government to reduce bureaucracy by replacing officials with algorithms hasn’t always produced the best results. Brazil has an app, Meu INSS, that was developed by a state-owned company, Dataprev, and is designed to handle social security claims. The app, which was launched in 2018, uses computer vision and natural language processing to analyze documents submitted to the government by claimants. Unfortunately, the app has a habit of rejecting legitimate claims based on minor errors. Those automated decisions can kick off lengthy legal battles that take many months to resolve.
The outlet documents the experience of one former sugarcane worker, 55-year-old Josélia de Brito, who filed for her retirement benefits through the app but was mistaken for a man by the automated system and had her benefits denied. “I have all the documents proving my health condition, proving everything, and [the benefit] still gets denied. It’s a humiliation,” De Brito told the outlet.
The nation’s rural farmworkers have struggled with the increasingly digital face of social services, the outlet notes. “People out here cannot [even] work with Gmail, Facebook, Instagram,” Francisco Santana, president of the Union for Rural Workers at Barra do Corda, told Rest of World. “Processes are [getting] more and more automated, and society wasn’t made ready for it, especially further away, in the outskirts, for people that live in rural areas.”
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