Business and society are changing all the time. Letterpress revolutioned information distribution. Electricity replaced fuels for light, computers and networking (partially) replaced paper in the office. E-mail and instant messengers replaced snail mail letters in many circumstances.
Now AI ([which is] just software) replaces certain activities, like doing (very) basic research.
If I need to find something out, I don't go to the library, borrow some book and the try to find it out. That is [my] grandparent's way to deal with that, I use search engines for that. AI software is able to handle basic customer questions, maybe not in the intended quality yet, but it might be improved. It is there - like cars are there - and will be used. We need to deal with that - there is no other way. I know that it can be abused - but almost anything can be abused.
Is this “Chat” engine mislabelled? Is it an “AI-based response system,” or something else entirely?
I don't know much about it - AI is a term that is widely used for many aspects.
In some circumstances it saves time and money, like computers did in the last 30 years. Government, at least in Germany, is very, very slow. There are people who don't want to change anything, because there is no market with competition for government tasks. Ai software is also used by the big players in the internet, e.g. for suggesting content or finding answers to questions the customers ask, e.g. Amazon's Alexa. People are free to use it or not. The disadvantage: More data will be collected.
I don't think that this is different from other communications. The internet is being used to influence people, TV and radio broadcasts are being used for that, since the 1920s. Did that create so many problems?