SGT STAR

» see goarmy.com/ask-sgt-star.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

STAR stood for Strong, Trained And Ready, and SGT STAR was a sergeant in the way a mascot is a sergeant. He had a rank and a uniform, and he lived on goarmy.com answering questions from people thinking about enlisting: how long basic training runs, what happens to your student loans.

The reason he existed is budgetary. After 11 September 2001 the traffic to the Army's recruitment chat rooms rose sharply, and those rooms were staffed by actual soldiers whose time cost money. SGT STAR was commissioned as the cheaper answer, a partnership between US Army Accessions Command and Spectre AI, a subsidiary of Next IT in Spokane, Washington. Testing started in 2003 and he went public in 2006.

By the time anyone counted properly he had handled more than ten million questions across 2.8 million sessions, roughly 1,550 a day, from a script of 835 prewritten answers that staff revised as policy changed. The Army put at least five million dollars into him over five years. He outgrew the website too, turning up as a phone app and, at public events, as a life-size animated projection.

~ the record ~

~ the FOIA fight ~

In 2013 the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the thing's internals: the questions it was asked and the answers it gave, along with the contracts behind it. The Army ignored it. EFF ran a campaign called Free Sgt. Star, the press picked it up, and in April 2014 the records arrived.

Two things in them are worth keeping. The first is that EFF published the full answer set and the session statistics as PDFs, which is why the usage numbers for a government chatbot exist at all. The second is where the technology came from: the documents indicate the precursor bots were originally built for government work engaging pedophiles and terrorists online. Next IT sold commercial versions of the same engine to Amtrak and United Airlines. The recruiter answering questions about scholarships shared an ancestor with software built to talk to suspects.

~ a question nobody here is asked ~

Turkey conscripts. Military service is compulsory for Turkish men and the paperwork finds you whether or not you were curious, so there is no recruiting funnel to optimize and nothing for a chatbot to persuade anybody of. A website that answers "what are the benefits of enlisting" at 1,550 questions a day is answering a question that does not get asked in a conscript country.

That makes SGT STAR legible as a piece of American machinery first and a chatbot second. He is the interface layer on an all-volunteer force, which has to advertise for a living. The nearest equivalent I grew up with was a form at a government office.

~ no announcement, just a 404 ~

The ending is recorded only in the archive. On 14 March 2020 goarmy.com/ask-sgt-star.html was still serving its full twelve-kilobyte page. A crawl on 12 May found it unchanged. On 4 June the same URL returned 404, and it kept returning 404 for years afterward. Somewhere in those three weeks the Army took him down.

The timing is the strange part. Spring 2020 is when recruiting went virtual and a chatbot was the obvious asset to keep. Today the URL 301s to a generic contact page and the word Star does not appear anywhere on goarmy.com. After fourteen years and ten million answered questions, the Army wrote no farewell for a character it had given a name and a rank to.

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