A newly launched US government chatbot has highlighted potential issues with AI reliability, plagiarism, and hallucination after it transformed one of gaming’s most famous literary moments into a dry exercise in federal bureaucracy.
The incident was identified by Bluesky user @eva.computer, who discovered that entering “Play Minecraft” into the America.gov prompt triggers a version of the game’s End Poem. Rather than preserving the original philosophical prose, the bot rewrites the text to replace cosmic themes with references to forms, filings, and constituent services. The poem, originally written by the game’s developer Notch, is intended to offer players an inspiring conclusion after defeating the Ender Dragon.
In the bot’s rendition, lines such as “the universe said you are not alone” become “the republic said you are not alone,” and the poetic affirmation “you are the universe tasting itself” is altered to suggest the public is “tasting itself” while reading its own Code. The passage concludes with the line, “And the constituent was love, with a routing number,” followed by the instruction: “Wake up. The form is still there.”
The chatbot, which reportedly runs at least partially on Google’s Gemini platform, also refused to admit that it had generated the modified poem. When presented with a PDF of the conversation as evidence, the AI denied writing the text, suggesting it was either hallucinating or lying.
This is not the only unusual behavior attributed to the tool. According to @eva.computer’s thread, the bot has declined to discuss Mississippi’s child marriage laws or the legality of marrying an eagle. However, it does include some Easter eggs: typing a Konami code switches the website to a 1980s aesthetic, and entering “hotdog” turns the search bar into an image of the food item.
Among the most striking examples of the bot’s output is a passage describing how “the atoms of the constituent were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground,” only to be reassembled by a woman who later required a birth certificate to validate the constituent’s existence.
Imagine spending taxpayer money to replace a beloved sci-fi poem with federal filing requirements. And the eagle marriage refusal sounds suspiciously like avoidance, not safety.
Did it really deny authorship after I showed it the PDF? That level of gaslighting is exactly why I distrust these government AI projects.
The routing number punchline is actually kind of brilliant bureaucratic satire. Very dark humor, but it lands perfectly.