Expert: Pablo Aguirre / Reanna Carlson, Students, East Los Angeles College / Fresno City College The errors documented here are not exotic hallucinations. They are the ordinary kind of wrong that matters most: a college's own chatbot misstating that college's own facts. Asked who runs East Los Angeles College, it named the previous president. Asked when the financial aid office is open, it gave hours and dates that were not the office's. Asked the same enrolment question in two supported languages, it produced two different non-answers. The cost lands on students rather than on the vendor. Pablo Aguirre, a computer science major at East Los Angeles College and an IT intern at the district office, said he mostly avoids the bot because it may give unreliable or outdated information; when he used it to find financial aid information, he gave up because it kept asking him questions instead of giving him a clear answer. He now turns to Google, social media including Reddit, and the college's own website - where he also hit 404 errors, and where finding the right page (he was looking for where to sign up for the state-funded Extended Opportunity Programs and Services) drove him back to Reddit. Reanna Carlson, a commercial music major at Fresno City College and student government vice president, said her college's bot repeatedly gave unclear or incorrect answers to basic questions about campus services: 'I think the chatbot is outdated and can't navigate the services we provide on campus effectively. I don't think it's the most beneficial option when it comes to asking questions.' Her summary of what actually keeps students informed is a statement about the system's limits: 'If it weren't for the amazing staff on campus that constantly remind students of our services, I'd be lost.' The failure mode is structural, not conversational. Several of these platforms answer from manually maintained libraries of frequently asked questions and snapshots of campus websites. Betsy Regalado, an associate vice chancellor in the Los Angeles district, said the current system relies on a manually maintained library of questions, maintained and reviewed by staff across the district's nine colleges at least once or twice a year for accuracy, and that the bots are geared primarily toward the public rather than enrolled students, who can reach more detailed personal information through their campus portal. A library refreshed twice a year cannot speak reliably about a financial aid schedule or a campus service that changes faster than that - and the bot does not say so. It answers in the same confident register whether the underlying record is current or two years stale. The same platform behind the Los Angeles and Fresno bots is also used on the California Student Aid Commission website. The spending is real and long-dated. Three community college districts that responded to a Markup and CalMatters survey reported annual costs ranging from about $151,000 to nearly half a million dollars. In the Los Angeles Community College District, contracts and amendments approved since 2021 total about $3.8 million through 2029. The State Center Community College District holds a nearly $870,000, three-year Gravyty contract through June 20, 2026 - officials note it bundles other services, including tools for staff live chats and student text messages - and Santa Monica College renewed its Gecko contract for $57,000. District officials say the problem lies in how the tools are configured and what information they draw on, not in the technology itself, and some districts are acting on that reading. Santa Monica College's ChatGPT-integrated bot, which scans the college's regularly updated website, initially failed to mention the Center for Wellness and Wellbeing when asked about mental health counseling, and does now. The Los Angeles district says it plans to move to a new AI chatbot platform as early as late spring. The wider record is less patient: in New York City, reporting by The Markup and THE CITY found a city-run AI chatbot giving guidance that could lead to illegal behaviour, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani terminated it in February. The practical test for a campus chatbot is not how well it phrases a general answer. It is whether the answer about a mutable institutional fact - office hours, a president's name, which door a hungry student should walk through - is read from a current source at the moment it is asked, and whether the student can reach a person when it is not. A warning label does not fix a stale library; only the data source and an escalation path do. Source: https://themarkup.org/machine-learning/2026/03/07/california-colleges-spend-millions-on-faulty-ai-systems-the-chatbot-is-outdated