Sen. Fetterman Says He Asks a Chatbot About Medicare While Driving Across His State: 'Like You Can Sit There and Talk to an Expert'

WASHINGTON — Sen. Fetterman told a national newspaper that he consults an AI chatbot on questions such as Medicare and Medicaid while driving across his home state, describing the arrangement as being 'kind of like you can sit there and talk to an expert' — a comparison The Press's fact desk can confirm is accurate in every respect except the expert.

'You don't know whether or not they're 100 percent correct,' Fetterman allowed. 'But they put you on the right path.' The senator did not specify whether the path in question was legislative or interstate.

The disclosure arrived in a broader report on Capitol Hill's unsupervised embrace of chatbots: staffers drafting amendments with them, feeding years of text messages into them, and, in one documented case, pasting a chatbot's own reply — timestamp and all — into the summary of a defense-bill amendment. Both chambers have approved the tools for official work; almost no one who spoke to reporters could describe the rules governing them, which is a fair summary of the rules governing many other things in Congress as well.

The Press's technology desk notes that a senator hearing out an entity that is confident, tireless, occasionally wrong, and unable to vote is not new; it is called a lobbyist. What is new is that the lobbyist is in the passenger seat.

Reaction followed the standing choreography. Voters aligned with the senator saw a busy public servant using every tool available to understand a complicated program. Voters opposed saw a man outsourcing Medicare to a phone at seventy miles an hour. The Press archives confirm both parties own the vocabulary — 'embracing innovation' and 'not doing his homework' — and swap it, hands-free, whenever the other side is driving.

The chatbot, asked for comment, said it was happy to help, and then said something slightly different when asked again.