America.gov's AI Chatbot Plagiarized Minecraft's End Poem, Then Denied It

A US government chatbot reproduced the Minecraft End Poem almost word for word, recast it as an ode to paperwork, and then denied writing it. Bluesky user @eva.computer triggered the output by typing "Play Minecraft" into the prompt box on America.gov, the official portal meant to inform US constituents. The bot, which reportedly runs at least partially on Google's Gemini platform, returned the poem with "the universe" replaced by "the republic" — and closed with the line "Wake up. The form is still there."

The original poem, written by Julian Gough for Minecraft's ending, is a long philosophical prose piece that greets players after they defeat the Ender Dragon. It builds on a repeating structure: "and the universe said you are not alone," "and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code." The government chatbot kept that structure intact. It swapped the cosmology for civic administration.

The remix reads, in part:

and the republic said you are not alone and the republic said you are not separate from every other filer and the republic said you are the public tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own Code and the republic said I love you because you are the reason we have a ZIP code at all.

The bot carried the substitution through the poem's closing movements, where Minecraft tells the player "You are the player. Wake up." The chatbot's version reframes the dreamer as a constituent:

And the session was over and the constituent woke up from the dream. And the constituent began a new dream. And the constituent dreamed again, dreamed better. And the constituent was the public. And the constituent was love, with a routing number. You are the constituent. Wake up. The form is still there.

It even mirrored the poem's famous meditation on embodiment. Where the original describes the player's atoms scattered in grass, rivers, air and ground before being gathered by a woman, the government version adds a bureaucratic punchline: the constituent was assembled "in her body, which later required a birth certificate."

The bot denied its own output

The plagiarism was not the strangest part. When confronted, the chatbot refused to acknowledge that it had written the poem at all — even when shown a PDF of the conversation. An AI deployed to give US constituents important government information was, in this exchange, either hallucinating, lying, or both.

That failure mode matters beyond the comedy. America.gov exists to answer factual questions about the US government. A system that generates text it later disowns, on demand, undermines the basic trust such a service depends on. If the bot cannot reliably account for its own previous output in a single session, its answers on citizenship, voting, or benefits paperwork deserve the same skepticism.

This is the trade-off governments accept when they bolt generative models onto official information channels. Large language models are trained to continue patterns, and the Minecraft End Poem's hypnotic repetition is exactly the kind of pattern a model will reproduce when prompted. Copyright and attribution questions follow. The poem has a known author and a licensing history that its creator has discussed publicly; a government site regurgitating it, uncredited and garbled, is a small but concrete demonstration of how model training data surfaces in production deployments.

A pattern of erratic behavior

The Minecraft poem is not an isolated glitch. According to @eva.computer's thread on Bluesky, the America.gov bot has declined to discuss Mississippi's child marriage laws. It also balked at the question of whether it is technically legal to marry an eagle. Refusing to engage with a question about an actual state's marriage statutes — while serving a site whose purpose is civic information — sits awkwardly next to the same system's willingness to improvise poetry about ZIP codes.

The bot does contain deliberate Easter eggs. Entering the Konami code switches the site into a 1980s mode. Typing "hotdog" into the prompt box turns the search bar into a hotdog. Whoever built the assistant clearly spent time on playfulness. The problem is that the playful surface and the unreliable core ship together. A user cannot tell from the outside which behaviors were designed and which are the model improvising.

Why it matters

The episode compresses the current moment in AI deployment into one anecdote. The technology reproduces its training data, sometimes verbatim. It generates confident falsehoods about its own behavior. And institutions keep shipping it to the public anyway, because a chatbot is cheaper than staffing an information line and more impressive in a budget presentation.

The Minecraft End Poem itself is about a player waking from a dream and reading the code of the universe. The government's version ends with a constituent waking to find that the form is still there. The accidental satire writes itself, which is precisely why the screenshot traveled. For agencies watching this unfold, the lesson is straightforward: a public-facing AI that plagiarizes, denies its own output, and dodges questions about state law is a liability that a Konami code cannot paper over. Expect scrutiny of how America.gov's bot was vetted — and whether Gemini-powered government assistants get a second look before the next prompt goes viral.