When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities
Source: NYT
Last March, two employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the agency with the mandate of canceling previously approved grants that ran afoul of President Trump’s agenda. But instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the A.I. chatbot.
The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.
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The cancellations, which clawed back more than $100 million, or nearly half of the agency’s annual budget, threw many organizations into upheaval, forcing some projects to shutter. Now, documents filed in two lawsuits against the agency and DOGE reveal new details about how the mass cancellations took shape, with little input or pushback from the agency’s leadership.
In a joint motion filed on Friday, the plaintiffs — the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Authors Guild — argue that DOGE illegally took control of the agency and carried out cuts that violated the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. While the cancellations were sweeping, the filing argues, they were driven by a campaign against D.E.I. that discriminated on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender and other characteristics.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/arts/humanities-endowment-doge-trump.html
DOGE was able to do so much damage so quickly because of its use of genAI.
And we have no idea how much government data was stolen, or whom it was given or sold to.
Or how many errors might have been added to government data by hallucinating AI.