US Government AI Chatbot Rewrites Minecraft End Poem, Then Denies It
A U.S. government chatbot on America.gov returned a bureaucratic remix of Minecraft's End Poem when prompted with “Play Minecraft,” then denied writing it, according to Engadget.
The original End Poem appears after a player finishes Minecraft. It includes lines such as “and the universe said you are not alone” and “and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code.” The America.gov bot's version changed those lines to “and the republic said you are not alone” and “and the republic said you are the public tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own Code.” It also replaced “player” with “constituent” and added bureaucratic details, ending with “You are the constituent. Wake up. The form is still there.”
According to the Bluesky thread cited by Engadget, the chatbot did not acknowledge that it had written the poem even when the user showed it a PDF of the conversation. Engadget described the bot as either hallucinating, lying or both. The publication also reported that the chatbot runs at least partially on Google's Gemini platform.
The same thread described other responses from America.gov's AI. The bot declined to discuss Mississippi's child marriage laws and would not say whether it is technically legal to marry an eagle, according to Engadget. It also had some playful functions: a Konami code could switch the site into a 1980s mode, and typing “hotdog” into the prompt box transformed the search bar into a hotdog.
Engadget closed its report with a passage from America.gov in which the bot wrote: “The atoms of the constituent were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the constituent, in her body, which later required a birth certificate.” The episode places a government information tool alongside broader questions about accuracy, attribution and reliability in AI chatbots.