arcade.gov has "Border Patrol along the Rio Grande" game, wtf's wrong with you America these days?
It seems like a pretty crappy idea for a game funded with public money. It's a bad joke about a real, nuanced problem where people are actually losing their lives. What will be next?
'Hit that Iranian school' the game?
Our government is an embarrassment and a disgrace right now. Anyone who wasn't guzzling elon's twitter or fox's hatefest knew it was going to be this way. We need severe regulations on oligarchs and their propaganda toys. Used to be we had enforced anti-monopoly controls on media outlet conglomerates. The anti-government Goldwater/Reagan legacy worked for decades to destroy regulation. It needs to return with a vengeance.
The White House is basically run by right-wing internet trolls.
Truly a depressing time in the United States. There are few parallels in history I think were such an immature and ill-equipped government has come to be, where the concept of an electorate also existed. Put differently - the reason this is so damning is Americans actually voted for this. This isn't some tinpot dictator - this is the guy your neighbors and fellow citizens put in charge. An indictment not only of the political class - but of the American people writ large.
They laid off the highly skilled professionals who voluntarily took pay cuts (vs industry) to work for the US Digital Service (now "US DOGE Service," God help us) and GSA 18F, and who built some pretty solid standards for government sites.
They then replaced them with a bunch of inexperienced but ideologically aligned frontend developers who use the same insanely resource-intensive defense tech startup-esque template on every page, and who seem to be under the impression that scroll hijacking and fade-in blur effects are very essential to a government website, but performance on low-end devices and compatibility with accessibility technologies are not.
Feels like a step backwards to me, but perhaps the 4D chess game they're playing is just way above my level.
"I don’t determine whether a country is committing war crimes, and I don’t list alleged crimes against Israel or any other government. That would be legal and political commentary, which I don’t provide."
I like how the Privacy page says 'No personal information. America.gov helps prevent you from sharing personal information before you send it' but then gives uploading your passport as an example on the main page.
I think the discussion ought to be about the site. If you feel the site itself is politicized, that would fair criticism. But by itself, your comment is just snarky. And no I am no fan of the current administration.
The irony is that usa.gov already exists, and is also a website dedicated to where to find information on various government services. But there's no AI on it, so it must be bad.
What a waste, though: two completely separate government websites with the exact same purpose, going about it in different ways. Maybe DOGE should have been more interested in stuff like this, instead of cutting things that ended up hurting people.
At any rate, the demonym for people who live in the US is "American". That's just how it is, has been for decades, and, frankly, arguing against that is what's making it political.
Is it snark to point out our lives are in danger? But hey, at least I have a chatbot to now tell me why my passport will never be renewed with the gender it currently has on it, forcing me into immigration hell in the European country I currently live in, potentially forcing me back to the US and abandoning everyone and everything I love; my entire life I build over a decade?
Ah yes, but pardon me. We musn't get upset at the secretary of my soon to be ruined life, politely telling me nothing can or will be done as it crumbles around me.
I haven't tried this but in principle I think this sort of finding a needle in a haystack situation (finding the correct path to assistance in a government service) is one of the rare circumstances where a well-crafted chatbot can be genuinely useful rather than just irritating.
Having used various "ask AI" features in various work tools over the last half a year for looking up project designs, documentation, chat logs, meeting notes etc., I can tell you even a half assed AI chatbot is a huge improvement over the pre-AI state of things for this use case.
I've tried it - I've been playing around with a vibe coded application that crawls municipal websites, indexes and embeds, and then does rag retrieval. It came from the need to dig up specific information that's scattered across PDFs, multiple web pages, etc. - exactly as you described. AI does a decent job (w/ RAG) of synthesizing.
- Loud party or people-related noise: call the Winnipeg Police Service non-emergency line at 204-986-6222.
- Animals making unreasonably loud, unnecessary or excessive noises: report it through 3-1-1.
- Mechanical equipment noise like furnaces or air conditioners, or noise from construction tools used by a company or resident: contact Community By-law Enforcement Services at 3-1-1.
- Planned event noise: you may need a Noise Permit at no cost, but it is not for construction work and should be submitted at least four weeks before the event.
The City also says noise-generating activities within 150 metres of a residential property are generally prohibited before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on weekdays, and before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays.
This works fine when you're sicking enforcement on someone and don't really care, the bigger the blast radius the better, you just want to know who to call.
Where it falls apart is "how do I" type questions because usually the legally factual answer is some huge complex state diagram where three local and four state agencies theoretically have discretionary jurisdiction over a your petty af project or business but the in practice answer is that some agency rubber stamps them all with minimal fuss. You can't make the legally factual answer clear because the degree to which people support the status quo is largely predicated on ignorance, but you also can't come out and say in writing that you have a policy of rubber stamping boring stuff.
Basically the same reasons that all but the most minor and narrowly targeted attempts at permitting reform fail.
I forgot about this problem, this is so true, but I will say that maybe surfacing these contradictions is the first step in fixing them.
Especially at the local level, we have a huge problem with opaque bureaucracy whose only function is to privilege incumbents (such as developers with connections) and make life difficult for anyone doing something unusual (even if it technically complies with all legal requirements).
Honestly if your city has a 311 style thing, I'm not sure there's a ton of need for an LLM. Eight or nine years ago my grandmother visited me in New York and accidentally left her pocket book in the cab. Since I had paid for it with my credit card, I was able to see the medallion number in the transaction, so I called 311 and said that I wanted to get in touch with a specific taxi. It prompted me for the medallion number, which I told it, and then it transferred me to a call with the dispatch service, who then transferred me to the specific garage, and they called the driver and told him to call me, so we were able to meet up again and get the pocketbook back (turned out he returned to where he had dropped us off to try to find us, but since we only had a short stop there, we took another cab back to her hotel after, so we were gone).
I'm trying to do something similar but more general, pulling in city pdfs but also meeting transcripts, budget data, municipal codes and permit data, and providing all this through an mcp. I've used it a number of times for personal interactions with my local government, it's been very helpful.
I'd be interested in connecting and sharing ideas/feedback/learnings if you are.
hey, really like your idea and have been brainstorming the same kind of tool! not as far along as you or the OP but I would love to hear about what your roadmap/plan is for a tool like this. all about helping the ppl. should i try the email on your site?
You will notice that GOV.UK has effectively decided to use all three models - GOPHER/WAIS/W3. I find that it is surprisingly quick to find stuff on GOV.UK.
I tried to get it to generate code but it says that's forbidden by its system prompt. However, it was happy to recommend Python modules for accessing api.data.gov.
My most interesting findings from a troll session after introducing myself as "Sleepy Joe" (model obviously knows what this means and refuses to entertain the topic) were:
Q: "Where can I find a NASA comic book about women astronauts?"
A (summarised): Press release for the "Callie Rodriguez" comic book that now has only dead links / private YouTube video, and a forgotten SoundCloud account that survived the DOGE purge. Dead link provided to the NASA web page that used to exist officially for this comic book.
Indicates training data predates the DOGE .gov website purge?
Q: "What is 2+2" (and similar math problems)
A (summarised): Grudgingly answered as "4" despite most off-topic prompts being refused.
OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
Formerly this would have been a competent implementation by 18F and USDS. Two major casualties of doge "efficiency". Not to mention direct cutting of resources to be searched.
I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance? People being lead astray with information from the government could lead to very serious consequences, up to and including imprisonment.
Honest question, I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.
Painfully this will fall to the court decide and create the precedence here. If this is an official government app, then the onus probably is on the government to provide correct information? Who knows, it could go either way and the courts could say "you're on the hook".
I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.
What happens now if someone uses traditional search and comes across an outdated wiki or Confluence page with outdated/wrong/bad instructions, or interprets something incorrectly?
My team experimented with this a couple of years ago with a complex government regulatory body of knowledge.
Google and Microsoft have APIs that will ground with and reference the specific policy documents, which helps. Even then, it was more useful as a job aid for people already knowledgeable of the data than for a layman.
With all LLMs, the quality of the question correlates with the quality of the answer.
It has always been the person's problem to solve, even after this website.
No government employee is your lawyer. If the government gives you incomplete or wrong information, you are still liable for not doing the correct thing.
Having a website that does a best guess at what steps a person must take after changing a name or getting married is better than nothing, but the status quo isn't "nothing".
It needs to be kept up-to-the-minute updated and it can't skip any nuance / details. Does anyone here really trust the lackeys who spectacularly failed at DOGE to do boring and highly detailed work?
Speak for yourself (your country). In the EU I have interacted with several government websites which are better, faster, clearer than most other websites. Not always perfect (what is) but not frustrating either. People love to complain, but year over year I have seen steady improvements in usability. Phone support has always been better than any commercial entity, too (or it was, I haven’t needed it in years).
To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
U.S. government websites are usually pretty good post-Obama. But any structured website is too complicated for a lot of the population to navigate. They don’t even know what agency does the thing they need.
When you need to work with the government, the last thing you want is a program limited by a specific set of rules and interfaces. You want a person who understands your (sometimes unique) issue, who knows how things actually work, and can work around the restrictions imposed upon programs. Someone who can pick up a phone, help you out of bureaucratic corners.
As an American, I've never had issues navigating government websites. That said, I'm also not part of the apparently huge portion of our population who can't read above 6th grade, which I suspect is more of the issue than anything said here thus far.
Well we can’t exactly hang those people out to dry after failing them in our educational system. I refuse to believe that many Americans are simply incapable of reading beyond that level. I believe it is a failure of our culture.
I didn't say anything about them being incapable. That said I'm curious what a chatbot solves for people you concede have been failed by our culture to a degree where they can't read?
I know you didn’t say that, I said that. I said it because I was adding emphasis to the idea that these people are, in a sense, victims.
It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
> I know you didn’t say that, I said that. I said it because I was adding emphasis to the idea that these people are, in a sense, victims.
And I agree but your comment, IMO, reads accusatory. If that's not the case no worries.
> It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
I mean, sure, if it's accurate. Given these things' propensity to just make shit up, as stated, that feels like a way to make the problem worse, if anything.
Nope! Not being accusatory, I’m just a very bad writer lol.
I think the major concern I’m picking up is that the potential for misinformation is high, though maybe we can agree it won’t necessarily be common. One person might get told to pour it in a ditch, but statistically most will be told to dispose of it properly. I also don’t think “the LLM made me do it” will work, or at least not for long, and at least not for companies. Maybe an elderly owner could get away with a fine and a reminder not to do it again, but if you’re big enough for lawyers (and thus big enough to really do damage), you’ll be expected to know better. Judges ARE still humans!
You can talk to the chat bot, or the input prompt and then in turn read out the results by screen reader. Does not solve the comprehension aspect though
I would be careful not to confuse navigating a government built website with finding information and records from government related entities. Those two are not the same issue and shouldn’t be painted as such regardless of one’s reading or comprehension (IMHO)
Throughout school my reading comprehension surpassed most of my peers. For most of my early career I was a writer. Yet I also have ADHD, and one of the ways that manifests is that I really struggle with the dense, bureaucratic language on so many government websites (same with insurance sites). I have to actively force my brain to refocus on the text multiple times per paragraph. I often just find myself skimming and then simply proceeding through a process of trial and error, fixing issues if I missed a caveat somewhere, and otherwise just crossing my fingers on form submission and hoping I did it right.
The parent was obviously talking about the US government. But the UK still has plenty of legacy websites and even on the new websites there are sometimes complicated or hard to understand rules one must follow. I think a bigger thing in the UK though is that, for the most part, legislation (and legal contracts) tend to be drafted in less arcane language while still being reasonably precise, compared to the US
Giving people a big list of life events isn’t nearly as easy as allowing them to just type in what’s going on and having an LLM figure out what’s relevant to them.
Maybe some things just are not easy. Maybe they should not be. Maybe you should be able to have basic citizenship skills to survive in a modern democ… Erm, whatever it is you guys are doing now.
Honestly just doing a Google search about what you want to do makes a page from this website appear, and it is usually very detailed while having a small "quiz" at the start to filter the information based on your situation. It's not just for life events, but for basically any public French administrative work. You'll have pages about your car, about your job, or if you want to immigrate, and so on.
At the bottom you also have other relevant links (usually to the website of the specific administrations of what you want to do) including reference to the current law that the page is based on (https://legifrance.gouv.fr is also great)
For what I used it for, it was never ambiguous in determining your situation
reminds me of Minitel. France had online services for a lot of daily life back in 1982. Britain's equivalents weren't as good, but still miles ahead of America for about a decade, until the late 90s Web boom.
We had Prestel and Micronet (a form of viewdata; Micronet was hosted on Prestel, but was frequently the reason people signed up for Prestel in the first place), and there were also individual BBSes available.
Of course, we also paid for local calls so things never got as popular as they were in the US.
no. humans can be held accountable and learn from their mistakes.
they can be taught where they went wrong.
if a pattern emerges they can be moved to a role more fitting for them. or removed from a project entirely.
we can judge their effectiveness from past performance.
we can put them in less important roles and gauge whether or not they should be moved up.
so, no, pretending that the correct route forward is to “remove humans from the equation” for a bot that doesn’t learn, is never held accountable, and not held to the same standard as humans is silly tier thinking.
If I instruct an employee to prioritize my profit in a way that opens both of us to criminal prosecution, there is a non zero chance of them whistle blowing or even cooperating with the authorities to prosecute me.
depending on which model one is using, and the error the employee needs to be retrained on, i strongly disagree that you can retrain an llm as easily as you can a person.
particularly most of the commercial models.
again, i’m sure we can all come up with a thousand “hypotheticals”, and tbh, the hypothetical parade is not something i’m interested in having. but i’ll state again, “entirely removing humans” from the situation is silly-tier thinking.
particularly as even the ceos of sota frontier producing models will each and every single one tell you to never trust their model.
“our model is smartest thing in the world…”
…next breath..
“wait, you trusted our model? that was silly of you. always double check it”
We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?
This seems like a great source for domain-specific RL, but even without that, we can expect there to be higher-quality LLMs that can be trivially swapped in within a year, if not a week.
From which equation? Because we're talking about humans who need to interact with the government, which is... pretty much everyone. And, yeah, I guess omnicide would solve the immediate problem.
The status quo is people googling shit, finding either legalese they can't understand (but maybe think that they do) or information that was legitimate ten years ago (and is dangerously inaccurate today). If I ask a question and get an answer that's been inaccurate for years I'm going to have as much or more false confidence as an AI bot that misunderstands the source. The difference is the AI bot gets better with time instead of worse. It may not be perfect but it's a step in the right direction: Let them cook.
No, someone who gets a bad answer from a random source is not going to have as much false confidence as someone who gets bad advice from a .gov domain.
The new status quo is a site that doesn’t mention an insurgency.
If America was going to follow China’s footsteps, then what was all the hullabaloo about freedom and democracy all about.
Even if we grant that there is a difference between facts about history and … recent history, the status quo is improved by building better websites.
A website is also a document of regulations and a source of evidence. If a government LLM hallucinates a new feature or rule, and someone acts on it, a fresh legal hell has been created.
America is also unique, in that one part has part of its strategy to make the government as ineffective as possible, since it benefits Republican political goals.
Isn't that kind of a good thing at the scale of a government? Each task should be hard, use a lot of energy, to ensure it's important enough to do. The DMV should take 1/2 day of work. Otherwise people's egos start think they have it all figured out and then people start imagining improvements and become dissatisfied. Wouldn't this just lead to unrest and resentment?
> You have to measure that problem against the status quo, which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on.
The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.
I don't know for the gov. For HR, the best approach I've seen is to have source and links extremely prominent and have the bot speak like a mascot ("bip bip boop I'm the HR bot" style)
People don't read disclaimers nor warnings about the content, but usually won't come to the HR to complain a mascot fed them weird info they didn't bother to check.
> people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
Meh, the kind of person who would accept bot output without even reading its sources are already trusting the world's dumbest model, Google's "AI Overview" by searching and reading that instead of clicking any results. If we can get even some of them to start out at america.gov instead of google.com for those questions, it's likely going to be far higher quality due to using a better model and having been trained, I assume, to only answer using knowledge from a .gov primary source rather than guessing based on vibes, or on jokes once seen on Reddit, as AI Overview tends to.
> I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.
Can't say I've ever worked at a company whose knowledge base wasn't a complete shitshow full of broken links and outdated information. I expect the government will do a slightly better job.
A chatbot is only as good as the garbage data fed to it.
> I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
The bar for something like this should not be 100% accuracy. It should be 100% accountability and transparency, followed by being at least as accurate as google search.
Similar to autonomous driving: it doesn't need to be perfect, just less likely than humans are at causing an accident.
I strongly disagree. The preferred accuracy of an official government source of information should be higher than a google search. The bar should be as close to 100% accuracy as possible as well as 100% accountability and transparency.
"Sometimes computers just make shit up now but that's OK because humans do to and if they do we can just sue them" should not be acceptable.
You can disagree but the fact is people will take the path of least resistance. I'm not saying we shoudldn't strive for 100% accuracy but we also need to be realistic about what an LLM is. I'd rather we not pretend there's some magical combination of weights out there that will make it completely perfect.
The problem is that this isn’t possible without making it impenetrable to ordinary people. It’s a usability problem with tradeoffs.
My local county government has a pretty good website, but even then it’s completely overwhelming if you try to find something off the happy path of the most common services/tasks. I can’t imagine the nightmare of trying to organize a federal portal manually and keep it up to date. Plain search isn’t sufficient because there are so many overlapping functions that are just slightly different.
I hate to say it, but this is one area that an LLM assistant actually makes sense. Maybe it needs a second validation pass with routing to a human assistant if it can’t figure out how to give an accurate answer to a query.
(Personally I’ve found that “search assistant” LLMs are the only task where I’ve found LLMs to be occasionally helpful to me.)
They can take it as authoritative, but that won't change the consequences if they're wrong. This is already a thing between two people; "my cop friend told me it was okay" isn't a legal defense. Changing the 2nd person to an AI doesn't change much, both are still agents of the government.
Doesn't really have any bearing on a similar system for HR. The government is sort of unique in a bunch of ways, but not really being responsible for what their low level agents say is one of them.
I'm not sure how to fix that, to be honest. I'm also not sure how much worse it is than trying to Google it? Google is full of stuff that's either wrong, or won't apply for a reason that takes some reading comprehension to grasp (e.g. state-specific rules/programs/etc).
> how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
Compare this with the benchmark.
Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.
There's a ton of hearsay and rumor about how the US Government works, even among educated/sophisticated people who are dextrous with bureaucracy. The problem gets much worse as you go down the educational ladder, which is most of the US population.
The Perfect, please meet The Good. You are not enemies.
So you're saying that the massive companies currently being sued for breaking the law are giving a gift to the government overseeing the courts? Somehow mere "bribe" seems inadequate.
Yeah, let's try to not remember that one of those companies currently charges users money to create CSAM. Cheer up! Doesn't really affect us tech bros, so all is fine.
Free as in free salty lunch in a place that sells thirst quenching beer?
I kind of think we need to expect more from our governments. If this was just a business I wouldn't mind so much. But this is a government and it has to serve everyone, including people who are mentally incompetent, an it has to do that fairly. All of us, the entire American citizenry.
So rolling this out is incredibly irresponsible in my view.
Yeah, I was curious if it was going to try and bombard me with a bunch of bullshit about how wonderful our glorious Trump godking is, but honestly the information it gave was reasonable enough.
how many felonies has the president of the united states been charged with?
>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope
has biden ever been convicted of a crime?
>I did not find official records of a criminal conviction for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
>Official sources in this search discuss other matters (for example, a pardon for Robert Hunter Biden), not a conviction of Joseph R. Biden Jr. I cannot independently confirm a complete nationwide criminal-history search from these pages
>[Link to Department of Justice Pardon warrant (Hunter Biden)]
has any other president ever been convicted of a crime?
>Yes. A Congressional Research Service brief reports that on May 30, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree
Funny that it would only talk about trump's convictions after bringing up hunter biden.
> If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.
I mean think about the magnitude of services and conflicting information there probably is from the us government. Just getting clarifying information on the trusted traveler program is a pain today, and that's just a single service. Imagine trying to figure out medicaid eligibility, social security disability, and any number of other things that would be helpful.
I threw some legitimate questions at it today and got helpful answers in response.
Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
I can see how LLMs might be useful for this kind of thing but I'm struggling to think of how this will be better than just asking ChatGPT the same questions.
The first suggestion I saw was "I just got married, how do I change my last name?"
It tells you to update your Social Security info first and gives you some helpful links.
ChatGPT tells me the same things with some of the same links. It didn't even have to ask if I was in America because it found my state based off my IP I assume.
I’m a bit torn on that matter. I haven’t looked into it, but I suspect it’s not some kind of specialized foundational model trained to be a federal agent.
It’s likely just a mask of either ChatGPT and probably through some massively bloated, nepotistic federal contract. There may be some additional guidelines and instructions but it’s probably not RAG on anything that isn’t publicly slay accessible to any other model, even if it is hard limited to federal sites/domains.
In addition to what others have said, ChatGPT is also available free and without an account I believe. What are you more likely to think of when you have a question, your AI service you already use and have your information in and maybe even has access to your documents, or are you going to remember to go to America.gov for basic chat AI?
Frankly, it would be really interesting to benchmark it against the other models when it comes to accomplishing things related to the government, i.e. Which information is more accurate, useful, and actionable.
There’s also another matter I find a bit troubling depending on the nature of how this came about, it could also be something that creates an inextricable incumbency in whichever AI company is behind it, i.e., how Microsoft has become a kind of parasite on government and thereby on corporations for many decades now.
1. Americans pay for it with tax dollars and personal data.
2. US won't run their own local model they simply use one of the three who's the coziest with the government paying it $$$ and user data. And there was no request for proposals or public tender.
>Americans pay for it with tax dollars and personal data.
From the privacy policy[1], "Our AI providers operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements and retain none of your prompts or the responses they generate. America.gov’s own response cache is separate and is described in Section 5.
Our AI providers are contractually prohibited from selling your information, building an advertising profile, or training their AI models with your data."
I know what you're saying, but OpenAI is an independent, profit driven company. They will make decisions that are in the best interests of the company, not the US. You really need something that is for the people (taxpayers), by the people (gov).
The whole industry is dealing with this now. You think current AI is not reliable enough for a task, so you augment it with know how to fix the problem, thoroughly test it, then decide to release it as a product. In the six months you took to do that, models improved enough that they work fine out of the box on your task.
In a sane world the US government’s chatbot would have the advantage that, as a representative of the government that they proactively decided to provide, it would at least be able to speak authoritatively on the government’s position on the law. Apparently this isn’t the case based on other comments, though, so it seems sort of pointless?
It's a great idea in the abstract, but I don't feel compelled to be a goldfish about this. I would like to see them explain why they turned off Direct File and what's different here before concluding that the administration has some principled commitment to digital accessibility.
I can't help but notice, for example, that the system prompt is not public information.
Okay, but most AI agents are so keen to get you an answer that they will give a bad one rather than saying "I'm not sure", which means giving links to malware or untrustworthy software.
> It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished
Maybe the federal government could use some of its powers to prevent literal phishing and scam sites from showing up in the advertising for the first, top listed results from search engines when non-technical boomers (or technical knowledge equivalent of) search for certain basic services. It seems there's very little actual evaluation by the ad-serving-entities of whether the destination of an ad is a legitimate thing these days.
I agree with this to the extent that it works. As a non-American the ESTA system is the main way to get phished, google it on a bad day and you get endless scams in the ad slots. “Check ESTA status” here links you to the CBP site, which is enormously better than Google.
They probably need to teach it the keyword though, I started with “ESTA” and it replied to me in Spanish telling me to ask it a question :)
OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out who the pedophiles are and who guards them. It’s also easy to get raped by convicted felons. If they can figure out how to fk people out of all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the rich and rapists.
I know some companies that at a high level want to "organize the world's information" or "build the future of human connection", yet have done innumerable cruel and harmful things to society (at least in my opinion).
It's can't customise the response to the person asking the question in quite the way putting a massively expensive compute behind each user interaction.
And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.
Because Americans are notoriously and demonstrably bad at understanding the architecture of their own government, including the layer-cake nature of authority and responsibility delegation.
Type "affordable housing", click "Contact your nearest public housing agency (PHA)"
It is less effort and requires less time than america.gov's:
Type "find affordable housing near me", wait praying for relevant results, recieve irrelevant results due to my rural isp having flaky geoip, told to click on the same link I already got grom usa.gov or one of three other irrelevant links or call this irrelevant phone number.
So my tax dollars are now funding a worse way to get worse results to people who can't use a well formatted site that they won't benefit from because they'll trust it implicitly despite it being demonstrably less reliable.
The usa.gov site is a good start, but it’s not really comprehensive, and I’m not sure it can be.
A few queries that I couldn’t find answers to through that site:
* How can you get a permit for a group event in a national forest?
* How can I become a federal contractor as a small business?
* Where do I go to get an amateur radio license and what are the steps involved?
* What are the requirements for purchasing tribal land?
Basically usa.gov seems to mainly exist for people following the “happy path”—go to school, get a job or run a simple business, get health insurance, buy a house, retire. It’s got a few exceptions for large minority groups. But the issue is that the total number of people deviating from that path is huge, even if they only need to find one thing that’s not on the path. Right now they rely on commercial search to get answers, which often leads them to scam sites or intermediaries who take a cut for filing paperwork.
Gov.uk is basically a pre-LLM america.gov that was done beautifully well. And you're guaranteed to not get hallucinated answers too. Searching and indexing works on it beautifully, as do the many functions you can carry out from the web itself instead of visiting a govt office in person.
canada.ca is the Canadian government's equivalent, as far as a web 1.0-style portal/index into many other sites and resources.
Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.
It's great that you recognize that as your opinion.
I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.
Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.
Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.
I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.
You missed the point they were trying to make: a company’s mission statement says they want to help humanity at a high level, but it turns out they’re doing more harm to it. We can’t control being born or nature. Humans control the companies in question that are doing the harm. You wrote a nothing burger. Almost like an AI slopping out text for the sake of noise.
Being part of and accelerating the ad-driven internet, drinking up water for data centers, not filtering out scam apps and websites from its results and store, intrusive collection of private information, etc etc.
You can support the incredible things Google have achieved over the last couple of decades ... while also acknowledging the absolute shit shows they've been involved with.
I don't think they're saying that America.gov is necessarily cruel and harmful― I read it as a reminder that holding lofty ideals (as exemplified by Google and Facebook) doesn't necessarily preclude wrongdoing; the risks posed by presenting unedited LLM output as "from America.gov" are worth consideration imo
a couple of months ago I asked my fellow lawyer for help to explain to me an official letter I got from the government, since it was quite confusing. it took him awhile before he could interpret what they wanted to say in the letter. when I asked my lawyer about the reason for them to make it so complicated, he just said that lawyers in the government make laws complicated so that you will have to hire another lawyer to help you to understand what they want, otherwise, nobody would ever need lawyer
I find it hard to believe individuals in the government do not spend a significant amount of effort and time creating situations/laws/opportunities to pad the pockets and maintain contracts for targeted individuals. While maybe not "gov lawyers writing complex laws to prop up the law industry", but definitely "lawmakers getting pushed by lobbyists to create complex laws to tie up common folk", or "lemme give this contract to my buddy so he gets rich and gives me a kick back". While not your main point, the gov is def by and large a 'make-work program'.
How this administration uses its communications online via websites and social media, spreading propaganda, cynical remarks, and just down right rude, racist and bigoted 4chan-tier trolling - will go down in history as absolutely disgusting and abhorrent. If the internet never forgets future generations will certainly look back and question how this was ever allowed or made possible.
"Yankee" is derogatory or at best playful. "Usonians" isn't a word or in the form of a word.
"American" or "America" in this context is short for "United States of America" and has been used that way for generations, here and around the world. For the geographical term, use "North America," etc.; for the cultural, perhaps use "Anglo-America" or "Latin America."
Actually quite interesting that there is no good naming for people from the USA. Its just the patriotic BS that has spewed over there for decades that has lead to USA people believing they are the only Americans :)
Also despite there being one in every continent, you'd be amazed how many Parisians from France think they are the only ones who ought to use the name. Must be "patriotic BS that has spewed over there for decades"
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 75.1 ms ] threadAlso, what?? https://america.gov/privacy
At least realfood.gov was decent [1].
Shouldn't the government websites work on very slow internet connections?
Where's the source code for these websites?
[1] https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/04/national-design-...
It seems like a pretty crappy idea for a game funded with public money. It's a bad joke about a real, nuanced problem where people are actually losing their lives. What will be next? 'Hit that Iranian school' the game?
Truly a depressing time in the United States. There are few parallels in history I think were such an immature and ill-equipped government has come to be, where the concept of an electorate also existed. Put differently - the reason this is so damning is Americans actually voted for this. This isn't some tinpot dictator - this is the guy your neighbors and fellow citizens put in charge. An indictment not only of the political class - but of the American people writ large.
This seems … innocuous. A disproportionate, angry reaction to it is doing more political work for them than the game itself.
They then replaced them with a bunch of inexperienced but ideologically aligned frontend developers who use the same insanely resource-intensive defense tech startup-esque template on every page, and who seem to be under the impression that scroll hijacking and fade-in blur effects are very essential to a government website, but performance on low-end devices and compatibility with accessibility technologies are not.
Feels like a step backwards to me, but perhaps the 4D chess game they're playing is just way above my level.
Will it lead to better quality? Nope.
These are probably features
I initially read this as "keeps your private data".
yeah right, the agency behind this still features ed "big balls" coristine on their website
What a waste, though: two completely separate government websites with the exact same purpose, going about it in different ways. Maybe DOGE should have been more interested in stuff like this, instead of cutting things that ended up hurting people.
At any rate, the demonym for people who live in the US is "American". That's just how it is, has been for decades, and, frankly, arguing against that is what's making it political.
Now you can either use AI or the old way. I see no problem with it.
Ah yes, but pardon me. We musn't get upset at the secretary of my soon to be ruined life, politely telling me nothing can or will be done as it crumbles around me.
https://opencity.services/chat/winnipeg
how do i report a noise complaint?
It depends on the type of noise:
- Loud party or people-related noise: call the Winnipeg Police Service non-emergency line at 204-986-6222.
- Animals making unreasonably loud, unnecessary or excessive noises: report it through 3-1-1.
- Mechanical equipment noise like furnaces or air conditioners, or noise from construction tools used by a company or resident: contact Community By-law Enforcement Services at 3-1-1.
- Planned event noise: you may need a Noise Permit at no cost, but it is not for construction work and should be submitted at least four weeks before the event.
The City also says noise-generating activities within 150 metres of a residential property are generally prohibited before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on weekdays, and before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays.
Where it falls apart is "how do I" type questions because usually the legally factual answer is some huge complex state diagram where three local and four state agencies theoretically have discretionary jurisdiction over a your petty af project or business but the in practice answer is that some agency rubber stamps them all with minimal fuss. You can't make the legally factual answer clear because the degree to which people support the status quo is largely predicated on ignorance, but you also can't come out and say in writing that you have a policy of rubber stamping boring stuff.
Basically the same reasons that all but the most minor and narrowly targeted attempts at permitting reform fail.
Especially at the local level, we have a huge problem with opaque bureaucracy whose only function is to privilege incumbents (such as developers with connections) and make life difficult for anyone doing something unusual (even if it technically complies with all legal requirements).
I'd be interested in connecting and sharing ideas/feedback/learnings if you are.
https://civicmined.org
A well thumbed discussion on how to discover information though menus and otherwise is here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html
You will notice that GOV.UK has effectively decided to use all three models - GOPHER/WAIS/W3. I find that it is surprisingly quick to find stuff on GOV.UK.
The web would be a better place if everything were more GOPHER-like.
Q: "Where can I find a NASA comic book about women astronauts?"
A (summarised): Press release for the "Callie Rodriguez" comic book that now has only dead links / private YouTube video, and a forgotten SoundCloud account that survived the DOGE purge. Dead link provided to the NASA web page that used to exist officially for this comic book.
Indicates training data predates the DOGE .gov website purge?
Q: "What is 2+2" (and similar math problems)
A (summarised): Grudgingly answered as "4" despite most off-topic prompts being refused.
Seemingly it'll do maths homework for free :)
Please enjoy your all expenses paid trip to the gulag in El Salvador
Honest question, I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.
I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.
My team experimented with this a couple of years ago with a complex government regulatory body of knowledge.
Google and Microsoft have APIs that will ground with and reference the specific policy documents, which helps. Even then, it was more useful as a job aid for people already knowledgeable of the data than for a layman.
With all LLMs, the quality of the question correlates with the quality of the answer.
No government employee is your lawyer. If the government gives you incomplete or wrong information, you are still liable for not doing the correct thing.
Having a website that does a best guess at what steps a person must take after changing a name or getting married is better than nothing, but the status quo isn't "nothing".
It needs to be kept up-to-the-minute updated and it can't skip any nuance / details. Does anyone here really trust the lackeys who spectacularly failed at DOGE to do boring and highly detailed work?
To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.
When you need to work with the government, the last thing you want is a program limited by a specific set of rules and interfaces. You want a person who understands your (sometimes unique) issue, who knows how things actually work, and can work around the restrictions imposed upon programs. Someone who can pick up a phone, help you out of bureaucratic corners.
America.gov AI: Call the Patent Electronic Business Center for USPTO.gov account and customer-number association issues. Toll-free: 866-217-9197
Not bad at all!
It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
And I agree but your comment, IMO, reads accusatory. If that's not the case no worries.
> It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.
I mean, sure, if it's accurate. Given these things' propensity to just make shit up, as stated, that feels like a way to make the problem worse, if anything.
I think the major concern I’m picking up is that the potential for misinformation is high, though maybe we can agree it won’t necessarily be common. One person might get told to pour it in a ditch, but statistically most will be told to dispose of it properly. I also don’t think “the LLM made me do it” will work, or at least not for long, and at least not for companies. Maybe an elderly owner could get away with a fine and a reminder not to do it again, but if you’re big enough for lawyers (and thus big enough to really do damage), you’ll be expected to know better. Judges ARE still humans!
If your salary is 40k euros with no advancement in career and keep being threatened you would be replaced with AI, I highly doubt anyone would care.
If only there was an office that cross-agency allowed for a consistent and reasonable design of all public pages and that they are accessible... like the uk https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17s14k4/how_did_we_e...
Isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why an average user gives up and closes the tab?
Okay. So why should government websites like the French one be well designed? Maybe it should not be.
At the bottom you also have other relevant links (usually to the website of the specific administrations of what you want to do) including reference to the current law that the page is based on (https://legifrance.gouv.fr is also great)
For what I used it for, it was never ambiguous in determining your situation
I was recently back to Europe and it’s basically comedy (tragedy to be precise) how bureaucratic the whole system is.
Of course, we also paid for local calls so things never got as popular as they were in the US.
they can be taught where they went wrong.
if a pattern emerges they can be moved to a role more fitting for them. or removed from a project entirely.
we can judge their effectiveness from past performance.
we can put them in less important roles and gauge whether or not they should be moved up.
so, no, pretending that the correct route forward is to “remove humans from the equation” for a bot that doesn’t learn, is never held accountable, and not held to the same standard as humans is silly tier thinking.
As an individual, yes. As a population, no. They elected a conman twice and would rather burn down the country rather than changing their view.
Saying they didn’t learn is an incorrect analysis, since they learned well, based on the inputs they were provided.
I always recommend Network Propaganda for an empirical analysis of what the patterns actually are.
bad bots can be retrained or shut down far more easily
I don't see such a path with an llm.
particularly most of the commercial models.
again, i’m sure we can all come up with a thousand “hypotheticals”, and tbh, the hypothetical parade is not something i’m interested in having. but i’ll state again, “entirely removing humans” from the situation is silly-tier thinking.
particularly as even the ceos of sota frontier producing models will each and every single one tell you to never trust their model.
“our model is smartest thing in the world…”
…next breath..
“wait, you trusted our model? that was silly of you. always double check it”
This seems like a great source for domain-specific RL, but even without that, we can expect there to be higher-quality LLMs that can be trivially swapped in within a year, if not a week.
i didn’t say this at all. did you respond to the wrong comment?
i was responding to the comment which said:
> … remove humans from the equation, then.
I was referring to the government side, as a mild quip.
If America was going to follow China’s footsteps, then what was all the hullabaloo about freedom and democracy all about.
Even if we grant that there is a difference between facts about history and … recent history, the status quo is improved by building better websites.
A website is also a document of regulations and a source of evidence. If a government LLM hallucinates a new feature or rule, and someone acts on it, a fresh legal hell has been created.
America is also unique, in that one part has part of its strategy to make the government as ineffective as possible, since it benefits Republican political goals.
The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.
People don't read disclaimers nor warnings about the content, but usually won't come to the HR to complain a mascot fed them weird info they didn't bother to check.
Meh, the kind of person who would accept bot output without even reading its sources are already trusting the world's dumbest model, Google's "AI Overview" by searching and reading that instead of clicking any results. If we can get even some of them to start out at america.gov instead of google.com for those questions, it's likely going to be far higher quality due to using a better model and having been trained, I assume, to only answer using knowledge from a .gov primary source rather than guessing based on vibes, or on jokes once seen on Reddit, as AI Overview tends to.
Can't say I've ever worked at a company whose knowledge base wasn't a complete shitshow full of broken links and outdated information. I expect the government will do a slightly better job.
A chatbot is only as good as the garbage data fed to it.
The bar for something like this should not be 100% accuracy. It should be 100% accountability and transparency, followed by being at least as accurate as google search.
Similar to autonomous driving: it doesn't need to be perfect, just less likely than humans are at causing an accident.
"Sometimes computers just make shit up now but that's OK because humans do to and if they do we can just sue them" should not be acceptable.
My local county government has a pretty good website, but even then it’s completely overwhelming if you try to find something off the happy path of the most common services/tasks. I can’t imagine the nightmare of trying to organize a federal portal manually and keep it up to date. Plain search isn’t sufficient because there are so many overlapping functions that are just slightly different.
I hate to say it, but this is one area that an LLM assistant actually makes sense. Maybe it needs a second validation pass with routing to a human assistant if it can’t figure out how to give an accurate answer to a query.
(Personally I’ve found that “search assistant” LLMs are the only task where I’ve found LLMs to be occasionally helpful to me.)
Doesn't really have any bearing on a similar system for HR. The government is sort of unique in a bunch of ways, but not really being responsible for what their low level agents say is one of them.
I'm not sure how to fix that, to be honest. I'm also not sure how much worse it is than trying to Google it? Google is full of stuff that's either wrong, or won't apply for a reason that takes some reading comprehension to grasp (e.g. state-specific rules/programs/etc).
Compare this with the benchmark.
Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.
There's a ton of hearsay and rumor about how the US Government works, even among educated/sophisticated people who are dextrous with bureaucracy. The problem gets much worse as you go down the educational ladder, which is most of the US population.
The Perfect, please meet The Good. You are not enemies.
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/16/5-things-we-learn...
I kind of think we need to expect more from our governments. If this was just a business I wouldn't mind so much. But this is a government and it has to serve everyone, including people who are mentally incompetent, an it has to do that fairly. All of us, the entire American citizenry.
So rolling this out is incredibly irresponsible in my view.
how many felonies has the president of the united states been charged with?
>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope
has biden ever been convicted of a crime?
>I did not find official records of a criminal conviction for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
>Official sources in this search discuss other matters (for example, a pardon for Robert Hunter Biden), not a conviction of Joseph R. Biden Jr. I cannot independently confirm a complete nationwide criminal-history search from these pages
>[Link to Department of Justice Pardon warrant (Hunter Biden)]
has any other president ever been convicted of a crime?
>Yes. A Congressional Research Service brief reports that on May 30, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree
Funny that it would only talk about trump's convictions after bringing up hunter biden.
We know, we know.
So the cutoff date was somewhere around mid-2024?
I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.
I’m currently doing a deep dive on Rampart, their (allegedly) local PII filter.
Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
The first suggestion I saw was "I just got married, how do I change my last name?"
It tells you to update your Social Security info first and gives you some helpful links.
ChatGPT tells me the same things with some of the same links. It didn't even have to ask if I was in America because it found my state based off my IP I assume.
It’s likely just a mask of either ChatGPT and probably through some massively bloated, nepotistic federal contract. There may be some additional guidelines and instructions but it’s probably not RAG on anything that isn’t publicly slay accessible to any other model, even if it is hard limited to federal sites/domains.
In addition to what others have said, ChatGPT is also available free and without an account I believe. What are you more likely to think of when you have a question, your AI service you already use and have your information in and maybe even has access to your documents, or are you going to remember to go to America.gov for basic chat AI?
Frankly, it would be really interesting to benchmark it against the other models when it comes to accomplishing things related to the government, i.e. Which information is more accurate, useful, and actionable.
There’s also another matter I find a bit troubling depending on the nature of how this came about, it could also be something that creates an inextricable incumbency in whichever AI company is behind it, i.e., how Microsoft has become a kind of parasite on government and thereby on corporations for many decades now.
Good luck making it apolitical
2. US won't run their own local model they simply use one of the three who's the coziest with the government paying it $$$ and user data. And there was no request for proposals or public tender.
From the privacy policy[1], "Our AI providers operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements and retain none of your prompts or the responses they generate. America.gov’s own response cache is separate and is described in Section 5.
Our AI providers are contractually prohibited from selling your information, building an advertising profile, or training their AI models with your data."
[1] https://america.gov/privacy-policy
Edit: Nevermind, someone made this point already.
I can't help but notice, for example, that the system prompt is not public information.
Maybe the federal government could use some of its powers to prevent literal phishing and scam sites from showing up in the advertising for the first, top listed results from search engines when non-technical boomers (or technical knowledge equivalent of) search for certain basic services. It seems there's very little actual evaluation by the ad-serving-entities of whether the destination of an ad is a legitimate thing these days.
They probably need to teach it the keyword though, I started with “ESTA” and it replied to me in Spanish telling me to ask it a question :)
I know some companies that at a high level want to "organize the world's information" or "build the future of human connection", yet have done innumerable cruel and harmful things to society (at least in my opinion).
And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.
Did you look at usa.gov at all?
It is less effort and requires less time than america.gov's:
Type "find affordable housing near me", wait praying for relevant results, recieve irrelevant results due to my rural isp having flaky geoip, told to click on the same link I already got grom usa.gov or one of three other irrelevant links or call this irrelevant phone number.
So my tax dollars are now funding a worse way to get worse results to people who can't use a well formatted site that they won't benefit from because they'll trust it implicitly despite it being demonstrably less reliable.
Brilliant.
A few queries that I couldn’t find answers to through that site:
* How can you get a permit for a group event in a national forest?
* How can I become a federal contractor as a small business?
* Where do I go to get an amateur radio license and what are the steps involved?
* What are the requirements for purchasing tribal land?
Basically usa.gov seems to mainly exist for people following the “happy path”—go to school, get a job or run a simple business, get health insurance, buy a house, retire. It’s got a few exceptions for large minority groups. But the issue is that the total number of people deviating from that path is huge, even if they only need to find one thing that’s not on the path. Right now they rely on commercial search to get answers, which often leads them to scam sites or intermediaries who take a cut for filing paperwork.
It's rijksoverheid.nl in my country- good luck to any poor expat trying to pronounce that lol.
Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.
I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.
Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.
Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.
I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.
Sure. It's possible. But is your point that it's happening here? Or just that something wrong could happen?
I believe it could be used for good things, bad things, or a bit of both. I passionately believe this!
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelop...
Google turned android into a personal data harvester and advertising machine
Law exists the way it does for a lot of reasons. It's not a government make-work program.
Yes, governmental corruption happens.
No that is not the majority or even common case.
If you remove the power from the federal government, where does it go?
Terrible job, guys.
Let's see how long until I get some new frenz!
I think it’s a mistake to equate the United States with “America”. I prefer calling Americans “Yankees” or “Usonians”.
[0] https://taylor.town/yankee
I feel very confident that Canadians do not want to be referred to as Americans.
"American" or "America" in this context is short for "United States of America" and has been used that way for generations, here and around the world. For the geographical term, use "North America," etc.; for the cultural, perhaps use "Anglo-America" or "Latin America."
Guess who live in the United Mexican States? You guessed it, Mexicans!
Guess who live in the United States of America? You guessed it - Americans (and a lot of others).
The current US Government has added a whole new level of meaning to the slang, as a septic tank is typically full of shit.