In a press conference this week on New York City’s $12 billion budget gap, Mayor Zohran Mamdani zeroed in on the previous administration’s artificial intelligence chatbot as one of “a number of different things we’re going to pursue for savings.”

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[–] 204 points 9 months ago

It feels ridiculous I have to say this, but it feels so good to hear about a politician just immediately saying "oh yeah, we needed to figure out where to make cuts, and these shitty AI chat bots seemed like an obvious place to start."

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  • [–] 180 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Wild that a politician deciding to terminate an application (and its associated contract) because the application doesn't actually work as intended seems so odd.

    But I like it.

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  • [–] 30 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Yes! It is so sad this seems like such a bold move, but we've just become so fucking conditioned to bullshit politicians gaslighting us about why everybody else is just going to have to go without in order to keep giving handouts to the most entitled and useless pieces of crap just because they're already wealthy.

    Why? Allegedly because they generate more money... But do they really? Have they ever?

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Trickle-down economics, or Reaganomics, is built on the tired promise that handing tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations will magically fix the economy through reinvestment and job creation. This is just a recycled version of the horse-and-sparrow theory, which basically argued that if you feed a horse enough oats, the sparrows can eventually pick through the manure for the leftovers. It is the same gaslighting we see with austerity measures where politicians ignore the actual damage they cause to chase some supposed "greater good," even though their own policies usually created the economic mess in the first place. You can see it clearly in Arkansas with the new ABAWD food assistance laws that claim to encourage work but actually strip benefits from orphans aging out of foster care and families with kids over fourteen. These policies intentionally gut government revenue to benefit the wealthy and then use that manufactured budget crisis as an excuse to slash public services like education, infrastructure, and social programs.

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  • [–] 103 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    Adams is a dickhole collaborator. I’m surprised the contract was only around $600k. How much so you think Adams got on top?

    I wish Mamdani the best. There’s so much happening to be able to ingest it all, but so far he seems genuine. My natural glare of “what SHIT are you up to!??” has so far yielded nothing; Good. More!

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I'm more concerned that he'll have an uphill battle against vested interests than anything he might do himself.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Oh, absolutely! He will stumbling blocks thrown at him from every which way. And then his lack of progress will be pointed at by the propagandists: “look at this Democratic Socialist who did nothing! Blah blah muslim blah blah blah”

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  • [–] 61 points 9 months ago

    The chatbot, which was released by the Eric Adams administration in fall of 2023, was meant to provide business owners with an accessible way to check city rules and regulations. But as first documented by The Markup and THE CITY, the bot provided answers that, if followed, would lead to illegal behavior by businesses, like taking a cut of employees’ tips.

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