“The PDF tool is the first project developed by Code for America’s AI Studio, which launched early this year, a new team intended to be nimble enough to keep up with the rapid pace of development in the AI field, where fierce global competition drives weekly releases of smarter and cheaper models. She said the PDF problem rose to the top of the pile quickly once her team started searching for problems, because it’s so common in government, and because it presents a salient challenge to those who care about public service.
‘Websites are the front door to government services and these websites often have a lot of PDFs,’ Thom said. ‘The federal government in 2023 had 4 billion PDF downloads across agencies and some of those top forms that were downloaded were tax forms. These are things that provide direct government services to people, and if the PDFs are inaccessible then it really makes getting through that front door a lot harder.’”