If you're a landlord wondering which tenants you have to accept, for example, you might pose a question like, "are buildings required to accept section 8 vouchers?" [...] In testing by The Markup, the bot said no, landlords do not need to accept these tenants. Except, in New York City, it's illegal for landlords to discriminate by source of income [...] The bot said it was fine to take workers' tips (wrong, although they sometimes can count tips toward minimum wage requirements) and that there were no regulations on informing staff about scheduling changes (also wrong).
New York City launched the MyCity chatbot in October 2023 to help small business owners work out what the rules are. The Markup tested it five months later and found it confidently describing illegal conduct as permitted, in several languages, on housing discrimination, tips, scheduling and funeral pricing. One detail is worth keeping: when a single reporter asked whether landlords must accept housing vouchers, the bot once said yes, but when ten staffers asked the same question it told all ten no. A wrong answer that is not reliably wrong is also not reliably testable. The city left the bot up, labelled as a beta.
