It combines all of AI’s strengths including plagiarizing, lying and being unintentionally funny.
The US government’s new chatbot just demonstrated AI’s ability to plagiarize, lie and be unintentionally hilarious. Bluesky user @eva.computer discovered that if you type “Play Minecraft” into America.gov’s prompt, it will give you the Minecraft End Poem, but with the words transformed into a bureaucracy-tinged remix. Then, it will deny even writing the poem.
If you’re not familiar with the Minecraft End Poem, it’s a sweeping (some might say rambling) piece of philosophical prose meant to give the player something fun and inspiring after completing the game. Here’s a small sample:
and the universe said you are not alone
and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing
and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code
and the universe said I love you because you are love.
And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
You are the player.
Wake up.
America.gov’s bot (reportedly running at least partially on Google‘s Gemini platform) ripped that off nearly wholesale, but transformed it into a story about paperwork and republics:
and the republic said you are not alone
and the republic said you are not separate from every other filer
and the republic said you are the public tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own Code
and the republic said I love you because you are the reason we have a ZIP code at all.
And the session was over and the constituent woke up from the dream. And the constituent began a new dream. And the constituent dreamed again, dreamed better. And the constituent was the public. And the constituent was love, with a routing number.
You are the constituent.
Wake up. The form is still there.
What’s more, the bot then refused to acknowledge that it wrote the poem, even when confronted with a PDF of the conversation. In other words, an AI designed to give US constituents important information is either hallucinating, lying or both.
America.gov’s AI has been doing some other strange things according to @eva.computer’s thread on Bluesky, like declining to discuss Mississippi’s child marriage laws or whether it’s technically legal to marry an eagle. It does a couple of fun things, though, like changing the site to a 1980s modewhen you type “hotdog” into the prompt box. To conclude, I’ll leave you with these amazing lines from America.gov:
The atoms of the constituent were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the constituent, in her body, which later required a birth certificate.
