Amidst the chaos and upheaval at the Social Security Administration (SSA) caused by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), employees have now been asked to integrate the use of a generative AI chatbot into their daily work.
But before any of them can use it, they all need to watch a four-minute training video featuring an animated, four-fingered woman crudely drawn in a style that would not look out of place on websites created in the early part of this century.
Aside from the Web 1.0-era graphics employed, the video also fails at its primary purpose of informing SSA staff about one of the most important aspects of using the chatbot: Do not use any personally identifiable information (PII) when using the assistant.
“Our apologies for the oversight in our training video,” the SSA wrote in a fact sheet about the chatbot that was shared in an email to employees last week. The fact sheet, which WIRED has reviewed, adds that employees using the chatbot should “refrain from uploading PII to the chatbot.”
Work on the chatbot, called the Agency Support Companion, began about a year ago, long before Musk or DOGE arrived at the agency, one SSA employee with knowledge of the app’s development tells WIRED. The app has been in limited testing since February, before it was rolled out to all SSA staffers last week.
In an email announcing its availability to all staff this week, and reviewed by WIRED, the agency wrote that the chatbot was “designed to assist employees with everyday tasks and enhance productivity.”
Multiple SSA employees, including front office staff, tell WIRED that they entirely ignored the email about the chatbot because they were too busy with actual work, compensating for the reduced headcount at SSA offices. Others said they had briefly tested out the chatbot but were immediately unimpressed.
“Honestly, no one has really been talking about it at all,” one source tells WIRED. “I’m not sure most of my coworkers even watched the training video. I played around with the chatbot a bit and several of the responses I received from it were incredibly vague and/or inaccurate.”
Another source said their coworkers were mocking the training video.
“You could hear my coworkers making fun of the graphics. Nobody I know is [using it]. It’s so clumsy and bad,” the source says, adding that they too were given inaccurate information by the chatbot.
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