Chatbot Politics

Eric Adams tumbles into tomorrow

I’ve been slightly obsessed, of late, with a particular quote.

“Bad things were happening,” Ingrid Lewis-Martin said. “But now MapQuest is almost perfected. Same thing.”

Lewis-Martin is the senior adviser to Mayor Eric Adams. Beyond Adams himself, she might be the most powerful person in New York City. Adams, in general, is not one to delegate tasks to outside experts—old-time patronage is his style—and Lewis-Martin, a longtime aide who dates back to his borough president days, has an enormous portfolio. If one wants to engage with city government, Lewis-Martin is unavoidable. Her primary qualification for the role seems to be a friendship with Adams that dates back almost 40 years.

The above quote concerns New York’s disastrous new AI chatbot. Politicians like Adams, still infected with the techno-utopianism bug, believe new little gadgets can solve all sorts of thorny urban ills. Robots can try (and fail) to police the subway. AI scanners can keep thinking people are carrying knives and guns when they really aren’t.

And now the Microsoft AI-powered chatbot can, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, tell New Yorkers all kinds of incorrect facts. New Yorkers, according to the chatbot, can’t withhold rent if their landlord doesn’t make needed repairs. (They can.) The chatbot still thinks the city minimum wage is $15. (It was raised to $16 in January.) The chatbot believes employers can take their employees’ tips. (They cannot.)

Lewis-Martin likened this all to MapQuest. There were kinks in the early software and eventually it was all worked out. Give the AI chatbot time—how much time, no one knows—and eventually New Yorkers won’t be deceived anymore.

A private company’s early struggles and a vital public information portal in America’s largest city are apparently no different. If there was one quote—a special cocktail of ignorance and arrogance—that could sum up two years and three months of Eric Adams’ New York, it was this one.