Berufsinfomat - Austria uses cheap ChatGPT interface to "solve" unemployment

[JBGruber]

 

 

 

Summary

In an effort to do "something with AI" (I assume), the Austrian employment office has started the "Berufsinfomat" chat bot. It is supposed to inform users about job related things and help them assess their career perspectives. Users have quickly found out that it is nothing else than ChatGPT with an arguably worse interface and presumably fine tuned with some documents by the unemployment office. All the usual tricks like asking unrelated programming questions worked in the beginning, but were now fixed. However, users are still not thrilled since the bot happily makes up salary ranges for made up jobs [1], jumps back to German, even when the user tells it to answer in another language [2], and discourages female users from careers in tech [3]. Twitter user Mario Zechner also found that requests seem to be sent to OpenAI [4], which raises privacy concerns, given that users are under the impression that this is an official governemnt service. Despite widespread criticism, the unemployment service, which has been caught before using algorithms to discriminate against women seeking jobs, says these issues will be fixed soon [5].

 

Sources

1 https://bsky.app/profile/thebruess.bsky.social/post/3ki7msqkk2426

2 https://bsky.app/profile/aurman21.bsky.social/post/3ki3up7ew7o2i and https://www.tips.at/nachrichten/ooe/wirtschaft-politik/630841-kritik-an-ams-berufsinfomat-kuenstliche-intelligenz-beraet-frauen-anders-als-maenner

3 https://bsky.app/profile/aurman21.bsky.social/post/3ki3p3rn6bf2i

4

5. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/oesterreich-ams-berufsinfomat-ki-jobsuche-1.6328787

[Average Nerd]

Wow. I am not surprised, since the austrian government has a thing for making half-finished stuff to save a buck and waste it somewhere else.

Now I am wondering how they managed to get unemployment rates down last year (at least the ORF news said that they went down, I have no reason not to believe that).

 

[Fasterthannothing]

Welcome to government where we take tons of your money and do a half way job but we aren't held to any standards so it doesn't matter 

[thorhammerz]

On 1/5/2024 at 11:31 AM, Average Nerd said:

Now I am wondering how they managed to get unemployment rates down last year (at least the ORF news said that they went down, I have no reason not to believe that).

Does the Austrian government use something along the lines of "people actively seeking a job, but aren't holding a part/full time job" as their criteria for unemployment?

[Average Nerd]

18 minutes ago, thorhammerz said:

Does the Austrian government use something along the lines of "people actively seeking a job, but aren't holding a part/full time job" as their criteria for unemployment?

I think the criteria is generally everyone who currently isn't employed, if I understood the article from the WKO (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich, Economy agency austria) correctly.

Edit: Here's a link, the site is in german though: https://www.wko.at/sozialversicherung/arbeitslosigkeit

Edited January 6 by Average Nerd

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 1/6/2024 at 5:29 PM, Average Nerd said:

I think the criteria is generally everyone who currently isn't employed, if I understood the article from the WKO (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich, Economy agency austria) correctly.

Edit: Here's a link, the site is in german though: https://www.wko.at/sozialversicherung/arbeitslosigkeit

That site refers to unemployment insurance recipients, not the unemployment rate. Don't know which one the ORF new piece was talking about, though.

 

On 1/6/2024 at 5:11 PM, thorhammerz said:

Does the Austrian government use something along the lines of "people actively seeking a job, but aren't holding a part/full time job" as their criteria for unemployment?

It seems so, according to their statistics office:

https://www.statistik.at/en/statistics/labour-market/unemployment/unemployed-seeking-work

[Average Nerd]

49 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

That site refers to unemployment insurance recipients, not the unemployment rate. Don't know which one the ORF new piece was talking about, though.

Now that I look into it, it seems that the news (on the radio) were talking about the overall unemployment rate dropping in the last couple of years, since the spike at the beginning of the pandemic, my bad.

Link to a ORF article from 1. December 2023: https://oesterreich.orf.at/stories/3234770/

Edited January 8 by Average Nerd

[JBGruber]

On 1/5/2024 at 5:31 PM, Average Nerd said:

Now I am wondering how they managed to get unemployment rates down last year (at least the ORF news said that they went down, I have no reason not to believe that).

 

Well, there is a massive labour shortage because of an ageing society and strict immigration laws (plus who would want to go to Austria when you can make more money in Germany and Switzerland or you don't have to learn German when you go to US/UK/Canada). Basically, the government solved this one by doing nothing for decades and one of the next governments will be blamed for not attracting more labour/immigration to the country, crippling the economy in the process.

[darknessblade]

Has anyone in Austria already tried jailbreaking the AI?

 

[Stahlmann]

Replacing the mostly useless first contacts such as call centers with a slightly less useless chat bot is a good thing imo. This implementation obviously doesn't even reach this already low bar. But here in Germany we have so many government employees that are so useless at their job that simple machine learning algorithms and chatbots could probably do a much better and faster job while also saving tax money. Sadly, our goverment is equally as tech illeterate as other european governments. Seems like Austria isn't that much better.

[Isuck Assimov]

On 1/10/2024 at 12:40 PM, Stahlmann said:

But here in Germany we have so many government employees that are so useless at their job that simple machine learning algorithms and chatbots could probably do a much better and faster job while also saving tax money. Sadly, our goverment is equally as tech illeterate as other european governments. Seems like Austria isn't that much better.

If the german government tried this they would somehow end up with something that does a much slower and worse job and is also a lot more expensive.

 

That's just how technology and digitalization works in good ol germany. Bunch of octogenarians

[Quackers101]

not sure how it works over there, but yeah it would be very worrying and breaking a lot of laws.

As in privacy and security of data and personal information, if a lot of personal info can end up in it and taken to third parties.