God this is beyond ridiculous.
They used ChatGPT to sort over 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants into spreadsheets. Their exact prompt to the AI was “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.”
They didn’t define what they meant by DEI. They just asked ChatGPT to figure it out. And then cancelled grants based on whatever it said. Probably didn’t even read past the yes or no.
The government’s defence was essentially ChatGPT did it, not us. When asked if he regretted people losing income, he said he didn’t, because reducing the deficit was more important. When asked if they actually reduced the deficit, he admitted they did not.
They caused real harm, achieved nothing they claimed to be pursuing, and expressed zero regret about it.
Just really horrible all around.
people losing income
More than a million of the poorest people in the world have died - so far - of starvation, exposure, and preventable disease, because of DOGE’s illegal cuts to federal programs like USAID.
Sure, we can call that “people losing income”. It’s technically true.
But Jesus, if I did something illegal and a million people died because of it, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.
I’ve seen on here someone saying USAID was just US Imperialism. I’m still a bit flabbergasted. Yeah sure it’s lipstick on a pig situation that the USA caused a lot of that. But then again, some of these people preach “don’t let perfection get in the way of better” but don’t practice it.
In the US you’d almost certainly be put to death for that
Given that this is at least the second time his administration’s incompetence has caused a million deaths (Covid being the first), sounds like you’d get elected president rather than executed in the US.
If you did something that illegal, they’d name an interstate highway after you and try to get your face on the Nickel.
Clearly, not.
The full extent of the harm caused by DOGE will not be fully realized for years to come
At which point people will have forgotten about DOGE and have to be reminded.
Nah, they’ll just blame whoever is president after Trump, or Obama.
This is why jails and punitive damages are a thing.
If you shit upon the public trust there must be penalties.
The first DOGE team that attempted the first government agency should have been gunned down in the lobby. That was security’s job, and they failed miserably. If they had done their job in the first place, America would be in a much different position now.
Same thing could be said for any of the motherfuckers who were supposed to stop all this, what the hell were they paid for?
tell that to scientists who left US because of this maybe they will come back? Likely not.
Now jail them.
The actual purpose of DOGE was to weaken the US soft power and cripple the scientific/academic foundation of society.
Actually I believe the main point of DOGE was to literally strip down the government oversight organizations that were investigating or going to investigate Elon. Everything else was just casualties in trying to hide that fact.
Ok but all those people found new jobs by now and the damage is irreversible. They need to punish the people who did it in an irreversible way too
NOW CONVICT THOSE RESPONSIBLE
We can’t do that, silly. That would set a precedent and we can’t have people being held responsible.
That would require the DOJ to not be political, and they very definitely are nowhere near that point anymore.
The Judicial needs their own enforcement arm. Once we’re through this (one way or another) the US Marshall’s Service should be moved under the Judicial Branch to enforce Judicial Decisions instead of relying on the Executive Branch.
Lol. They are rich.
Restoring grants to projects that don’t exist anymore and the criminals are punished by being called dumb. This is a great system and it really does work.
Yeah but the damage happened in real time. There would need to be standing to sue for the damages cause and accumulated since.
Anecdotal but it’s a real story about getting doge’d. I was working on some climate research as part of a climate smart commodities grant (search that program for details), a big one which took years to gain the trust of hundreds of indigenous farmers and non profits to participate in. We were already struggling with USDA bullshit and red tape trying to get payments to farmers who had already spent money and been approved for certain payments, before doge came along.
And because of doge, the entire 50mil program got cut. Maybe not hundreds but dozens of farmers and non profits went out of business because they chose to trust the federal government to be reliable on their word. Not to mention an almost 40 person research team, practically a whole department.
and the trust that took years to build to get these historically disenfranchised groups to the table, to get them to trust the process and work with the government… that’s NEVER coming back.
I worked for a company that increased government efficiency by 900% in a certain area.
Guess whose contract got cut by DOGE?
Well of course. Republican naming schemes are to call something the exact opposite of what it is. Across the board. Doesn’t matter if it’s something they’re trying to pass or something they are against.
If you hear them talking about something you can safely assume it’s the exact opposite of reality.
Heartbreaking
Anyway you should try to make HIM pay for as much as possible of the damage. Now that it is officially ruled.
Who is enforcing this? Saying it was illegal and to restore the grants is a good first step but they can just say no, not do it and face no repercussions so I don’t see how this solves anything.
The US “justice” system is toothless
It’s toothless unless it rules for the GOP. Ok
You know what I hate? That we don’t mock the fact that DOGE was named after a fucking dog meme and a meme coin.
That is literally the origin of the name of that de facto now apparently defunct “governmental institution”.
I wish the news orgs would have used the pronunciation of the letters based on what they ostensibly stood for, rather than the meme.
Just seems like calling them “Doggy” every time would have changed how much leeway people gave them.
Elon’s emotional maturity stopped developing as a teen. It’s why stupid memes are the height of comedy for him, and also why he doesn’t give a fuck about people dying based on his decisions.
This line from the article about DOGE still trying to shift responsibility to ChatGPT.
McMahon also pushes back on the government’s argument that “there is no real constitutional problem here because any viewpoint-based classification was ChatGPT’s doing, rather than the Government’s:”
“There is no distinction to be drawn here between the Government and ChatGPT. ChatGPT was the Government’s chosen instrument for purposes of this project, and DOGE’s use of AI to identify DEI-related material neither excuses presumptively unconstitutional conduct nor gives the Government carte blanche to engage in it. …There is not a scintilla of evidence that Fox or Cavanaugh, having obtained a “DEI” rationale from ChatGPT, undertook any meaningful review of whether that rationale made sense.”
This may be the biggest reason the Epstein class wants AI used everywhere: for some reason using and listening to AI makes them not responsible for the things they do, and the thing that scares them the most is being held responsible.
Fuck that argument. Treat it like the jackass who says “technically my pen wrote that”.
But … what about a cloud of computers?
All using a program written by a program that a human can not debug or trace the logic of because any source code existed only as an intermediate step in memory.
Let that decide the fate of millions, billions, and trillions.
I am a programmer and none of that made any sense.
I was six hours late, but it was such a perfect post to post that I’ll leave mine up as well.
Eeh, who is counting. ; )
Deserves a restatement.
I’m a broker and I asked a random homeless person what to do with everyone’s money that was entrusted to me, so they are the one on the hook when it’s all gone right?
I like the corollary I heard: “An AI can never find out, so an AI should never be allowed to fuck around.”
But the black box told us to do it, it is not our fault. This has got to be the dumbest timeline ever, but wait.
I know. Let’s build a white supremacist black box and then let it give us orders that way we aren’t racist. Oh darn, Muskrat was a step ahead and did that already.
And it literally led to the bombing of not one, but two Iranian elementary schools (I believe in one day), and over 100 dead schoolchildren.
We’re going to see a bunch of businesses blaming AI when they fail (because of AI…)
Those fucking assholes.
Can I get an unpaywalled link/article?
Ooh, thank you!
…good news?
Only until the SCOTUS six have their way with it
*the scrotus six
Probublica did a piece on something similar, they just used llm’s to flag words that they considered woke, and in the process cancelled a bunch of grants that had nothing at all to do with what they were targeting. They couldn’t be bothered to actually check the work of the llm.
Shocking that these fascist clowns aren’t good at governing even for their own ill ends.
Honestly I don’t think this is the article but idk it’s similar, this is just in regards to veterans affairs. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ai-tool-doge-veterans-affairs-contracts-sahil-lavingia
Shocking that these fascist clowns aren’t good at governing even for their own ill ends.
You’re missing the point of the exercise. They didn’t want to govern - they wanted to break shit.
Musk went in with the attitude “we will cut everything we have an excuse to cut, and then if one of our political allies objects to a cut, we’ll put it back”.
And DOGE implemented that plan perfectly.
They cut a bunch of grants that had nothing to do with “wokeness” because their goal was to cut as many grants as possible, no matter what they were for. The LLM was there as a propaganda tool - it let them falsely claim they were only cutting “woke” grants. It was there to give DOGE an excuse. The fact that it was wildly inaccurate was the reason they used it.
Probublica did a piece on something similar, they just used llm’s to flag words that they considered woke, and in the process cancelled a bunch of grants that had nothing at all to do with what they were targeting. They couldn’t be bothered to actually check the work of the llm.
The point was to break things in general while claiming they had specific targeted goals so they could continue the ‘government doesn’t work’ narrative for future budget cuts. Playing the part of a bull in a china shop was the intent and they have already done the damage.
Quite so. Although the real point was to secretly copy all government agency data to Thiel’s secret data banks, and whomever else. Musk was just the front man (clown,) thiel is the brains, and yarvin and their pals.
All those doge kids were likely recruited from their drug and sex fueled parties, and groomed for betraying america.
Nobody competent wants to work for these people so they’re left with opportunists who couldn’t find a career otherwise.
The DOJ can’t hire lawyers, it was previously a prestigious career path where people would accept paycuts for the opportunity.
It’s a metaphorical clown show. It reminds me of this scene in Chernobyl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idb_qsAAe1c
deleted by creator
After being deployed from DOGE to NEH, Justin Fox used search terms, which he labeled as “Detection Codes,” to identify grants that he dubbed the “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants.” The search terms included, among other terms, “BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),” “Minorities,” “Native,” “Tribal,” “Indigenous,” “Immigrant,” “LGBTQ,” “Homosexual,” and “Gay.” When Fox was asked whether he “r[a]n this list of words through every grant description” he received from NEH, he confirmed, “yes.”
I’m a bit at a lost for words here. That is way beyond what I was expecting.
Watch some footage from the interviews, it’s much much worse than you think. Unimaginably bad.
Really? That seems about par for the course.
