Social Security has rolled out a new chatbot — and the people are talking

John McGing couldn’t reach a human. That might be business-as-usual in this economy, but it wasn’t business; he had called the Social Security Administration, where the questions often aren’t generic and the callers tend to be older, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable Americans. McGing, calling on behalf of his son, had an in-the-weeds question: how to prevent overpayments that the federal government . His call was intercepted by an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. No matter what he said, the bot parroted canned answers to generic questions, not McGing’s obscure query. “If you...