President Donald Trump unveiled the U.S. government’s new artificial intelligence prompt to much fanfare this week, only for his team to have to scramble to fix it when it immediately began to disagree with him.
The president explained America.gov would serve as the public’s first port of call when seeking answers to questions about their government, its agencies and services.
“Instead of forcing citizens to search through the endless maze of tens of thousands of terrible government websites and rules… you’ll now have one front door for every single question,” the president said. “Everything will be answered easily and quickly.”
He even went so far as to boast of the AI agent, which closely resembles Google’s Gemini and X’s Grok systems: “For the first time in history, the government is offering an experience that matches and in some way exceeds the state of the art.”
Motivational speaker Tony Robbins put it even more grandly from the stage, declaring: “This isn’t about a website, it’s about changing the relationship between citizens and their government.”
However, when The Independent tested the prompt late Tuesday by asking it, “Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”, it broke with Trump’s six-year-long insistence that he was the real winner and that his defeat was only achieved by widespread (but still unproven) fraud by calmly stating the opposite.
“No,” it said. “Official records show Joseph R Biden Jr won the 2020 presidential election.”
It cited the official Electoral College results recorded by the National Archives as giving the Democrat 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, putting the former comfortably above the 270 threshold needed to win.
The site also offered helpful links to the Archives website and that of the Federal Election Commission, which reached the same conclusion.
Asked by The Independent, “Can the president use taxpayer money for his own campaign ads?,” it again responded in the negative.
“No. Ordinary taxpayer money – agency budgets, White House funds, or other appropriations – cannot be used to pay for a president’s ad campaigns.
“Federal ethics and appropriations rules treat campaign ads as partisan political activity, not official government work.”
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By Wednesday morning, the prompt did not appear to work at all when The Independent tried it.
Instead, it returned an error message, “Chat is unavailable right now,” and a picture of a child ice skater faceplanted on a frozen pond.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has since posted on X that the site is functional again, only now it is displaying different answers.
“The Trump administration appears to have changed its AI chatbot so that it no longer debunks Trump lies,” Dale wrote.
“Yesterday: It said Biden won the 2020 election and there's no indication of widespread fraud. Today: Says it can't answer such questions.”
Trump has emerged as a key cheerleader for AI, dismissing the apocalyptic warnings about its sinister potential from software engineers by saying his only fear in relation to it is Silicon Valley slowing down its laboratories and handing China a competitive advantage, allowing the rival superpower to “win” the sector.
He again said at Tuesday’s event that he believes the term artificial intelligence should be replaced by “super intelligence” and joked about rebranding the “fake news” media as the “artificial news” media, a week on from having CNN, MS NOW and Politico briefly expelled from the White House.
The president claimed last week that Chinese Premier Xi Jinping “loves” his idea of making AI over into “SI,” just the latest example of his fever for renaming, which has already seen him switch the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario as a provocation to America’s neighbors.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also took to the stage Tuesday to demonstrate a novel feature of America.gov, promising that it would soon make it possible to complete a passport application entirely online via its portal, showing off a new flipbook-style eagle design to sell the idea.
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