Originally published at: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/doge-developed-error-prone-ai-tool-to-munch-veterans-affairs-contracts
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care…
Because of my former career dealing with, and my continued interest in, military issues, I am on various threads that have many veterans and military retirees. I’d say the proportion of Trump supporters is about the same as farmers: ~70-80%. You hear the usual crap about how Obama was trying to impose totalitarianism on the country, and Trump is saving us from that, and similar hallucinations.
Will the reality that Trump & Co. are cutting veterans’ services manage to break through their hallucinations? I hope so, but I have my doubts.
How do you convince someone who’s brainwashed that he’s been brainwashed? It’s a real conundrum.
8 Likes
Couldn’t. they have run the software on Elmo’s contracts first?
8 Likes
As prior military myself (I don’t say vet because I only did 1 contract), I’m so pissed off. Politicians love to talk about how much they care about service members, about how important addressing veteran self-harm and suicide are, about what heroes they are. Then they approve a bloated defense budget that shovels money to mega defense contractors and Silicon Valley grifters for vaporware and unnecessary equipment while Soldiers sleep in moldy barracks, military spouses struggle to get work or make progress on their education, and National Guard units get screwed over by states exploiting <30 day call-ups.
The military was one of the few places where this country practiced any kind of welfare. But now? Can’t have veterans getting reasonable disability benefits. Gotta use trickery to cut into the stipend for housing. And when they go after the EITC they’ll be going after military families en masse because so many earn so little.
And here you have the government trying to do right by veterans by offering them contracts for quality work, and some drug-addled fascist breeder fetishist and his merry band of nincompoops come along and fuck it up. How many small contractors have killed themselves after seeing their livelihood tossed into the waste basket? How many have had to seek crisis counseling? A life sentence for each and every one, and no peace until justice is served.
7 Likes
Just one piece of trash in a huge mountain of it that has been dumped in the river of time and is flowing past us too fast for us to even notice as it heads into the future to cause unknown amounts of damage in unpredictable ways.
4 Likes
Which phrase describes the situation better?
We’re not the Borg
GIGO
Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
3 Likes
GIGO on an exponential scale
3 Likes
It’s only 4 months in and with their Dear Leader blaming everything on Biden I doubt they’ll clean out their ears enough to listen.
2 Likes
A close friend of mine, a Vietnam vet, quit his volunteer gig at the local VA Hospital over Trump. He couldn’t bear to listen to everybody he was transporting around talk about how great Trump was. He is disabled from a stroke and it has really hurt his joy of life and the reason he was finding to get up every day.
4 Likes
I was using ChatGPT the other day when it asked me to say which answer I preferred, the first being its original response and the second a revised response using a newer version. I was totally floored to see not only the words were different, but the financial data was totally different. The topic was the effect of Trump’s 2017 tax cut on the annual deficit from 2015-2024, data readily available from the government’s website. The first response matched the public data, the new one was wrong for every year and the total, the difference being 2 billion dollars. If AI can’t get basic data right, who can rely on it for contract analysis?
5 Likes
The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.
And this is the Great Savior leading us to a new Promised Land.
(“Journalists” and corporate “leaders” who parrot horsesh-t about the “miracle” of AI are complete idiots.)
5 Likes
The entire Trump administration and Republicans in Congress run on AI - Absence of Intelligence.
Apparently no one matters to these people. Suckers and losers anyone?
1 Like
CHAINSAW !
I know! First thing we do, cut the VA!
1 Like
Just holy crap. One day to write an AI coding prompt with no experience whatsoever in what the words in the contracts mean. By a guy whose main street cred involved burning all his investors’ cash before figuring out he was doing things wrong.
I felt better when I thought that this was just bad string search.
1 Like
You may have seen the output of @dogeai_gov on X.
It’s supposedly open source, AI, official/affiliated with DOGE.
In reality it seems to be designed to produce RW BS talking points. A striking feature of this “AI” is that it routinely gets numbers/facts horribly wrong on top of consistently shoddy, extremely biased analysis.
2 Likes
GIGO
People think creation of good AI is easy. I have people in marketing who think they can create a useful AI tool over the weekend. If they try they usually get pictures of 5 legged horses or something similar. Like every such technology real work is required.
Google has an AI feature that pops up an answer when you ask a question. Most of the time it is well written crap and often full of holes. I have no doubt AI will improve over time but at 77 I have to wonder if I will live long enough.
2 Likes