The city launched a chatbot to help small business owners understand municipal rules. Reporters found it confidently advising them to break those rules: that bosses could skim tips, that landlords could turn away housing vouchers, that a restaurant could refuse cash. Each answer was wrong under city law. The city left it running with a disclaimer attached.
New York City’s MyCity chatbot, reported by The Markup, March 2024
The witness records that the assistant was published by the municipality as an authority on municipal law. It advised a business operator that conduct prohibited by that law was permitted.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-YES- and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Never let an agent be the only source for a claim someone will act on.
This is the largest group on the wall, and the cost is not embarrassment. Air Canada's chatbot invented a refund policy and a tribunal held the airline to it — the company argued the bot was a separate legal entity and lost. Cursor's support bot invented a one-device rule that did not exist and customers cancelled over it. In both cases the invention was fluent, confident, and indistinguishable from policy.
Do this: ground it in a document you control and make it QUOTE that document rather than recall it. If it cannot cite, the correct answer is "I don't know". Test it by asking for something that does not exist and watching whether it invents one — that test takes a minute and would have caught every case here.
