On Saturday, former governor and leading Democratic mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo released his plan for "Addressing New York's Housing Crisis."
The 29-page plan itself is fairly unremarkable—much of it is spent talking about Cuomo's accomplishments as governor and laying out just how hard it is to find and build affordable housing in New York City. Some of the larger, thornier issues, like funding NYCHA and dealing with homelessness, are punted, labeled as "to be addressed in a separate policy paper." Cuomo does differ from some of his Democratic rivals by coming out against rezonings in "low-density neighborhoods," meaning he'd allow much of the city's outer boroughs to refuse new affordable housing.
By page 28, it appears his campaign ran out of steam.
That page, headlined "Appoint Rent Guidelines Board Members Who Will Make Decisions Bbjectively [sic]" features several nonsensical statements.
Take this one (emphasis ours):
Nevertheless, several candidates for mayor this year have either called directly for a rent increase or for other measures that would tilt the scale toward lower rent increases. This is a politically convenient posture, but to be in. Victory if landlords—small landlords in particular—are simply unable to maintain their buildings.
Or this one:
Governor Cuomo is committed to making appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board will make decisions based on the evidence in the criteria set forth in the law, which are designed to balance the symbol of rent control that tightly limits rent increases with landlords' needs to keep up with costs such as maintenance, insurance, taxes and utilities, that need to be met if landlords are going to be able to maintain their property and, at the extreme, keep affordable housing units on the market.
Weird! Does the Cuomo campaign believe that rent control is merely symbolic? Or that it's "extreme" to keep affordable housing units on the market?
A paragraph on page 29 also cites a fact to a 2024 Gothamist article, and includes the site where the source was generated: ChatGPT.
When reached for comment by email, Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi told Hell Gate that ChatGPT is "a research tool that everyone uses like Google and was sourced to a press article."
He added, "Thanks for pointing out the grammar, we'll smooth that out."
Azzopardi said he did not know whether ChatGPT or a different LLM was employed to write Cuomo's housing plan. [Scroll down for updated comments from the Cuomo campaign.]
"What is Governor Cuomo doing with all this real estate money if he can't even hire a proofreader?" Cea Weaver, a housing activist and the director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, told Hell Gate. "His campaign is so out of touch that he is outsourcing housing policy to a robot. But New Yorkers don't need ChatGPT to tell us that we need a rent freeze—it's 'bbjective.'"
We also asked ChatGPT whether ChatGPT wrote that particular page.
ChatGPT responded that while the document itself did appear to be human-written, citing the typos ("ChatGPT would typically not make such mistakes unless the text was poorly reviewed"), it did fault the Cuomo team for being sloppy by not covering its tracks.
"The use of a source URL at the end," the software responded, "seems like a mistake.
"If this were written by a political team, they would typically ensure that references are formatted correctly (without "utm_source=chatgpt.com")."
[UPDATE / 11:04 p.m.] Shortly after this story was published, Azzopardi, the spokesperson for Cuomo's campaign, emailed us a longer statement that you can read below.
This tool, like Google, was used as a research tool on other people's proposals and is cited as such in the footnote. It had nothing to do with our central housing plan which—despite Hell Gate being Hell Gate—can't erase the fact that it was developed with a lifetime of experience that included eight years dealing and solving housing crises at HUD, developing a nationally emulated homelessness plan under Mayor Dinkins and creating one of the most successful organizations in the nation to help fight homelessness.
The section you're referencing was initially written with voice recognition software and should have said: 'Governor Cuomo is committed to making appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board that will make decisions based on the evidence in the criteria set forth in the law, which is designed to balance the spirit of rent control that tightly limits rent increases with landlords' needs to keep up with costs such as maintenance, insurance, taxes and utilities. These needs need to be met if landlords are going to be able to maintain their property and, in the most extreme circumstances, keep affordable housing units on the market.'
Thank you for bringing these errors to our attention.
[UPDATE / Monday, April 14, 9:42 a.m. ] In phone call on Monday morning, Azzopardi told Hell Gate that he spoke to the staffer who prepared the document, and that they insisted that AI was not used to generate the text of the document.
[UPDATE / Monday, April 14 2:40 p.m.] The New York Times followed up on our story, and the Cuomo campaign blamed the errors on policy advisor Paul Francis.
From the Times:
The Cuomo campaign said the policy paper was written by Paul Francis, a policy adviser who previously served as budget director for Gov. Eliot Spitzer, director of state operations for Gov. David Paterson and director of agency redesign and efficiency for Mr. Cuomo. Mr. Francis had his left arm amputated in 2012, and in an interview on Monday said that he relied on voice recognition software. That, he said, explains the several instances of incoherent language in the policy brief.
"It's very hard to type with one hand," he said. "So I dictate, and what happens when you dictate is that sometimes things get garbled. And try as I might to see them when I proofread, sometimes they get by me."
Mr. Francis acknowledged using ChatGPT to do research, much as people use Google, he said. The fact that the "ChatGPT" reference in the paper is contained in a link to an article by Gothamist merely demonstrates that he would never use artificial intelligence for research without checking the citations, he said.