New York City Justifies AI Chatbot’s Advise for Business Owners to Break Laws

New York City has its own artificial intelligence chatbot, and it recently created a big issue after it was caught telling business owners in the city to break laws. The AI was reported to have given improper advice or wrong answers to entrepreneurs' queries.

City Mayor Defends MyCity Chatbot

Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, backs up the city's AI chatbot, MyCity, amid the criticisms. According to Reuters, the chatbot was said to have given feedback that if businessmen chose to follow it, it would cause them to violate the law.

The journalists who investigated the case discovered that the software application was getting things wrong. For instance, the MyCity chatbot erroneously advised that employers can take a portion of tips given to staff. It also told owners that no rule requires them to notify their employees about schedule changes, which is apparently wrong.

Despite this, Mayor Eric Adams said that the chatbot is still in the pilot phase; thus, there are errors. He suggested that the AI chatbot just needed to be fixed and would be working fine.

"It is wrong in some areas and we have got to fix it," the mayor told the media this week. "Any time you use technology, you need to put it into the real environment to iron out the kinks."

NYC Will Not Remove the Chatbot

Meanwhile, in a previous report, Associated Press News mentioned that New York has no intention of taking down its MyCity AI chatbot despite the blunders. The city created this AI tool to help small business owners and officials who had high hopes that the technology would do what it was supposed to do.

But not long after it was launched, criticisms started pouring in due to the misinformation the chatbot was disseminating. Julia Stoyanovich, a computer science professor and director of the Center for Responsible AI at New York University, commented, "They are rolling out software that is unproven without oversight. It is clear they have no intention of doing what is responsible."

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