A look at AVA, an AI chatbot developed by Alaska's court system to provide aid in the probate process, which has been plagued by delays and hallucinations
A yearlong effort to build an AI probate assistant reveals the limits of government chatbot development. X: @napoleonmedia . LinkedIn: Georg Zoeller . Bluesky: @ianmoody and @wowbaggert Forums: r/nottheonion , r/Futurology , r/technology , and Slashdot X: @napoleonmedia : The project has been plagued by delays, as chatbots put out hallucinations and unexpected results. https://www.nbcnews.com/... via @NBCNews @NBC @_perloj #AI #ChatBot #LegalTech #Alaska LinkedIn: Georg Zoeller : Yeah, of course it didn't. Somehow the world's most well provisioned tech companies have trouble making these things work for actual enterprise value … Bluesky: Ian Moody / @ianmoody : Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly. — A yearlong effort to build an AI probate assistant reveals the limits of government chatbot development. — www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne... @wowbaggert : Wondering when everyone is going to finally start internalizing that the hallucinations and other alignment problems aren't going to go away. Forums: r/nottheonion : Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly. r/Futurology : Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly. r/technology : Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly. Slashdot : What Happened When Alaska's Court System Tried Answering Questions with an AI Chatbot?
Context & Ripple Effects
AVA places a public-sector legal workflow alongside broader judicial experimentation with generative AI: US judges have been testing AI for legal research, case summaries, and routine drafting. Its troubled development shows that a narrowly defined workflow does not by itself eliminate unreliable model behavior.
The stakes are higher when chatbot output can shape a user’s understanding of a formal process. A prior ruling over an airline chatbot’s erroneous promise illustrated how automated answers can create consequences beyond the interface.
First-order effects
- Alaska’s court system must address AVA’s hallucinations, unexpected responses, and development delays before the tool can reliably aid people navigating probate.
- Probate users face an assistant whose answers require careful verification, limiting its value as a straightforward self-service channel.
Second-order effects
- Other courts considering generative AI for research, summaries, or routine documents will have a concrete reason to prioritize testing and human review before exposing tools to users.
- Vendors and internal government teams building legal assistants will be judged less on chatbot availability than on whether their systems can produce dependable, workflow-specific responses.
Third-order effects
- If similar deployments continue to falter, public-sector legal AI is likely to shift from broad conversational assistants toward more constrained tools embedded in defined workflows and review processes.
- The pattern strengthens the case that institutions deploying public-facing AI will need clearer accountability for erroneous guidance, particularly where users may act on it.
The trend: Government adoption of generative AI is moving from chatbot pilots toward a test of whether tools can meet the reliability and accountability demands of high-stakes public workflows.