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How Imitative AI will Cut Your Social Security [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-03-24

Apparently, one of the justifications for illegally cutting tens of thousands of government jobs is that imitative AI can do the work. Musk and Trump have hinted at this and you here this being trotted out by Republicans in their rather combative town halls. AI can do the work. It is clear that they intend to replace human judgement with imitative AI judgement. And we are all screwed when they do.

Imitative AI cannot do the work of a human being. That has been proven over and over again. Imitative AI coding is worse than humans and introduces security bugs. Chat bots lie to you about the laws of New York City or give you tax advice that will get you audited or invent laws and cases to cite. They can be decent at text analysis, but that is not enough to justify the amount of hype around the tools. So why would DOGE want to replace real workers who do real work with fake ones who get people in trouble?

Part of the issue is that Musk, like a lot of Silicon Valley dorkerati, hate their workers. Some of it is simple grift. The more imitative AI the government uses, the more money there is to spread around to people like, well, Musk. But a lot of it is a more complex grift, a way to further impoverish people in order to keep them constrained in their actions and feed more money to tax cuts for them. The mistakes, to pain, are the point.

Let’s imagine how this plays out in Social Security. First, they shut down most access to phone and people, closing offices and turn off phone services. Then, when you can get online, perhaps the chatbot gives you wrong information. Or perhaps the chatbot directs you to the wrong place. Or perhaps everything goes well but the chatbot, trained poorly and on bad assumptions, like the idea that people with birth dates in the 1850s are fraud rather than an artifact of the programming language the Social Security system uses. Or maybe everything goes perfectly, but you have an odd case or need to appeal the system’s ruling. Sometimes, you won’t be able to as the system will either direct you incorrectly or send you to an office. Except all the offices near you are closed.

The point, as you can see, is to remove human accountability for denying earned benefits and pocketing the money for themselves. Obviously, this will not be the experience for everyone. But it will be the experience of a significant enough portion of people to drive down the amount of money paid to the people who deserve it. And, of course, those “savings” will go to contracts for Musk and other Trump cronies or directly into tax cut for the wealthiest. And make no mistake, the result of these cuts will be suffering and death for those among us least able to fight back. The use of imitative AI will likely literally starve grandparents in order to enrich Musk and his ilk.

It is important to remember that imitative AI systems are not objective. Someone decided what to train them on, someone decided their rules, someone decided where and how to deploy them despite their faults, and someone decided to either have enough people to correct their errors and handle the cases they cannot or to choose not to do any of that.

Musk and his ilk will try and pretend two things. First, that imitative IA is reliable and consistent enough to replace human workers making life altering decisions. It is not. Second, that they will not be to blame for the imitative AI’s decisions because they come from a machine and therefor, they must be correct. They will be neither correct nor objective. That is the point. Why spend money on disabled people, hurt workers, and retirees when Musk and his ilk need their fourteenth super car?

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