'Hey! I’m chatting here!’ Fugazi answers doom NYC’s AI bot

Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions – but was often wrong – has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that, while the cash saved is only a fraction of what is needed to fund the budget, it was emblematic of how the last administration spent taxpayer money.

“The previous administration had an AI chatbot that was functionally unusable, and was costing the administration around a half a million dollars,” Mamdani said in a Wednesday press conference. “That in and of itself is not something that can bridge this gap, but it’s an indication of the ways in which money has been spent while refusing to account for the actual costs of what these programs are.”

The chatbot was announced in ...