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Satire · Sourced

Exhibit 04

A government bot that told you to break the law

In October 2023, New York City launched MyCity, an official chatbot meant to help residents and small-business owners cut through government bureaucracy. It was promoted by the mayor's office as a front door to city services. In March 2024, reporters at The Markup sat down and asked it the kind of questions a real business owner would ask. The answers were not just wrong. They were illegal.

What the machine did

Asked whether a restaurant could take a cut of its workers' tips, the city's official bot said yes. Under federal and New York law, it cannot. Asked whether an employer could fire a worker for complaining about sexual harassment, it suggested there were situations where that was fine. It is not. The bot told businesses they could go cashless, which a city law expressly prohibits. It gave confident, government-branded guidance that would expose any owner who followed it to lawsuits, fines, and liability.

"The chatbot, presented as an official city resource, gave answers that were flat-out wrong about basic workplace and consumer protections, and in some cases encouraged behavior that breaks the law."

The Markup, March 2024

What the city did about it

It left the bot online. The mayor's office defended the tool as a pilot and a work in progress, adding disclaimers rather than pulling it down. The reasoning is the recurring excuse of the entire industry: ship it, label it beta, let the public absorb the errors, and call the resulting damage a learning opportunity. The difference here is that the entity vouching for the bad legal advice was the government itself.

Why it belongs in the catalog

An official seal does not fix the underlying problem; it makes it worse. The same plausible-text engine that invents refund policies and court cases will invent legal advice, and a government logo on top of it lends authority the machine has not earned. The people most likely to lean on a free city chatbot are the ones who cannot afford a lawyer to tell them it was wrong.

Sources