The Brief

Los Angeles is directing millions to tackle homelessness but not all of it appears to be well-spent or properly accounted for, according to auditors charged with looking at how the city is putting those public funds to use.

Auditors with the firm Alvarez & Marsal said during a court hearing Wednesday that contracts with service providers were not written in a way by the joint city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to measure outcomes or to set standards for what counts as a hot meal or storage, for example.

That, auditors said, has resulted in inconsistent and poor care which they described witnessing during 18 “spot checks’ on providers.

Auditors, who are expected to complete a report this year, also described seeing broken showers and people still going hungry despite the massive public investment in reducing homelessness.

Auditor Diane Rafferty recounted how a woman with a traumatic brain injury prostitutes herself so she could afford food.

"It's heartbreaking, your honor,” she told U.S. District Judge David O. Carter. “It is heartbreaking.”

Kevin Call, who is part of the Skid Row community, was at the hearing and said afterward he agreed with the auditors’ assessments.

“In the city of Los Angeles, people are suffering on Skid Row,” Call said. “Even with all the money that’s supposed to be available and all that – somebody’s got to be held accountable for that.”

Lack of accountability

The audit comes out of a 2022 settlement with LA Alliance for Human Rights, a group of business owners and residents that had two years earlier sued over how homelessness is managed in the city and county.

The city settled first with the LA Alliance, agreeing to create nearly 13,000 new shelter and housing beds. L.A. County, in its 2023 settlement, said it would provide 3,000 new beds for the treatment of mental health and substance abuse.

The LA Alliance had wanted the city to pay millions in sanctions, saying it was not meeting the terms of its agreement. Carter decided on an audit instead.

Alvarez & Marsal, which was chosen earlier this year to do the audit, reported at the hearing that spending by providers is often unsubstantiated or inaccurate. They found in one instance, a service provider with apparently two case managers at one site had incurred expenses for 10.

Asked about potential fraud in the system by one of the monitors overseeing the settlement, retired judge Jay C. Gandhi, Rafferty offered a “political answer.” State and federal funds must be carefully tracked, she said.

“Otherwise, other people, much more powerful than us, could come in and audit that at a different level than we provide,” Rafferty said.

Carter said going forward, invoices with providers should provide more transparency by explaining what work was performed. He also said too many invoices from providers are missing dates and other substantiating information.

“We could speculate that this was set up by providers to get paid, and it was provider-oriented,” Carter said.

Shared responsibility

City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who presented an update on his office’s dashboard on the city’s homelessness spending, and city council members, including council president Marqueece Harris-Dawson, were also at the hearing.

Harris-Dawson asked the auditors if they knew of any other places that had a city-county entity like the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Rafferty said that L.A. appeared unique, and that just as LAHSA needs to hold service providers accountable, the city had to hold LAHSA accountable.

Later in the hearing, county Supervisor Chair Lindsey Horvath said she brought a different perspective about LAHSA.

Horvath noted that the LAHSA board is made up of 10 members, half chosen by the county, half chosen by the city.

“I don't see LAHSA as an outside entity,” Horvath said. “I appreciate that we want to hold LAHSA accountable. That’s us.”

What’s next

Carter scheduled several other hearings this month related to the settlements with the LA Alliance, including one on Oct. 16 in which L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is expected to attend. At that time, controller Mejia is expected to give another update on his homeless spending dashboard.

Carter, proclaiming a love of pie charts, said it was critical to get the data up so the public can see it, and elected officials can use it to make decisions. LAHSA announced Wednesday that it too is updating online dashboards "to track the work being done to address homelessness."

The website Your AI Slop Bores Me takes its name from a meme people on social media use to criticize AI-generated content. The site — a fake AI chatbot — has only been around for about a month. But its creator, Mihir Maroju, said it's already received more than 25 million unique visitors and nearly 280 million total hits.

"People are spending hours on the site," the 17-year-old high school graduate in Puducherry, India said in an interview with NPR. "I didn't really expect it to be so addictive."

As with real AI chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT, anyone can submit a request for an image or information by typing it into the youraislopbores.me interface. But in this case, the response doesn't come from an algorithm — just another human.

The joy of playing AI chatbot dress-up

More than one third of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, according to a June 2025 Pew Research study. People are not only deploying AI chatbots for everything from planning trips to doing homework assignments — they are also having fun impersonating them.

"Someone asked me to draw a bat eating a strawberry," said San Francisco-based cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, author of the chatbot-oriented graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, of her interactions on youraislopbores.me. "That was really fun." The site forces its human users to approximate the speed at which a machine would return a response; there's a 75-second time limit. So drawings, created with a mouse or finger on a trackpad, have a necessarily slapdash look.

Amy Kurzweil created her drawing of a bat eating a strawberry in response to a request on Your AI Slop Bores Me

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Amy Kurzweil

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In addition to responding to queries, Kurzweil said she's also enjoyed asking questions through the site. "I asked someone what they were reading. They said they were reading Twisted Hate, but they liked Twisted Games more." (Kurzweil said the exchange inspired her to look these titles up — they're part of a romance series by Ana Huang.)

With its old-school Comic Sans MS font — a staple of websites in the late 1990s and early 2000s — the cartoonist said Your AI Slop Bores Me inspires nostalgia for a time when the Internet was, for the most part, a lively, friendly place.

"I do think that people are reaching a point of frustration with the Internet being flooded with non-humans," Kurzweil said. "So I think people are having fun reclaiming some of the magic of the early Internet, just for the little joy of connection."

When NPR's Chloe Veltman asked youraislopbores.me a question about pink pompoms, an anonymous human provided a delightful response.

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Chloe Veltman

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Screenshot from youraislopbores.me

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Because the digital landscape has changed a lot since the late 1990s, Your AI Slop Bores Me's administrators said they have implemented tools that try to flag and filter out harmful or illegal contributions. "We had a lot of spam and people exploiting loopholes in the site," Maroju said. "Of late, we haven't had those issues.

The users of the site know their questions will be answered by humans. If its URL doesn't make this clear, the two tabs users can select from on the homepage — "human" and "larp as ai" (which means humans get to "Live Action Role-Play" as AI) — certainly do.

When the user doesn't know it's fake

But some parts of the AI-bot-dressup universe, such as Ben Palmer's brand of comedy, operate under different rules.

In a deadpan, 2023 skit on YouTube, the Nashville-based comedian talks about a fake ChatGPT website he set up not long after the real ChatGPT took off.

"Sometimes people end up on the website thinking that they're writing to the actual ChatGPT. But they're writing to me," he explains. Palmer goes on to describe his back and forth with a user in China — where the actual ChatGPT has been banned since 2023 — who unwittingly finds themselves on the comedian's fake version:

"They asked me to write an article on global climate change. And I tried to tell them that this isn't the real ChatGPT; it's a joke. And they wrote back and said, 'This is no joke.' And I gave them the address to the real ChatGPT, and said, 'I'm too lazy to write an article.' And they said, 'I need your help.'"

Palmer goes on to explain how he asks the real ChatGPT to write the requested article, which he then sends on to the user. He finally uses AI to translate the text, also at the user's request, into Chinese.

In an interview with NPR, Palmer said he set up a bunch of fake AI text and image generation sites with URLs very similar to the names of the real AI websites. He says some users would get angry when they realized they were being pranked by a human. But others played along. "They would keep going because they were now being entertained," he said.

The dark side 

The comedian said most of his sites have been pulled down from various platforms. He admitted there's a dark side to disguising himself as a bot. For example, he has declined to fulfill requests for sexually explicit content.

Palmer said his aim is to remind people that the Internet should be a messy, vibrant place — not one overrun by soulless corporations. "I want to see how people react when they think that they're talking to an AI and it goes off the rails," he said. "Sometimes they might surprise you."

"As more and more people embrace AI, it's naturally starting to show up across pop culture," said ChatGPT maker OpenAI in an email to NPR. "We love seeing how people are bringing ChatGPT into their daily lives, and the humor that comes with it is part of what makes that so fun."

San Francisco-based angel investor Brianne Kimmel, who has backed several AI agent startups, concurs.

"Humans pretending to be AI — that's great sketch comedy. But it doesn't mean we're going to use the technology less," Kimmel said. "It just means we recognize that there's a very clear language that's evolving around how we communicate with bots that's distinct from how we communicate with each other."

Copyright 2026 NPR

The Olympic and Paralympic Games will cost billions of dollars to put on, and lucrative contracts will be up for grabs to provide things like cleaning services, construction, catering, and IT services for the month-long spectacle.

L.A. public officials want that money to stay local, but many of them say a new procurement plan released by Olympic organizing committee LA28 could end up leaving out businesses in the city of Los Angeles.

"You could have a scenario where no L.A. business does any business with LA28," Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said at a council committee meeting Tuesday.

That's a problem for the city, which is the official Olympic host and the financial backstop for the Games. City Council members say business owners in the city should benefit the most from the money flowing into the Games. The Olympic contracts are worth up to $4 billion in total, according to LA28.

The dispute is yet another sign that the relationship between city government and the private organizers of the 2028 Olympics is fraying. In recent months, the two sides have clashed over an overdue agreement about what services the city will provide for the Olympic Games, and the city's potential financial exposure.

LA28's plans for Olympic contracts raises the perennial question about the coming Olympic Games: who in the city will actually benefit from the mega-event that will take over the region in the summer of 2028. It also indicates the limits of the city's ability to influence LA28's decision-making.

John Reamer, who leads the city's contracts department, said Tuesday that his staff did not review the procurement plan before it was released, and questioned if the relationship between the city and LA28 was a true "partnership."

"[I believed] that LA28 would allow us to give input, and they would take that input, and we would discuss that input and we would agree upon that input and it would be part of the plan," he said.

City officials want more commitments for L.A. businesses

LA28 says it's aiming to keep 75% of its spending in the Greater L.A. area, and put 25% towards small businesses. The report says it will prioritize "hyperlocal" businesses in the city of L.A., but makes no explicit promises. Instead, it identifies "local" as anywhere in L.A., Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

At a council committee meeting on the Olympics Tuesday, multiple members criticized that plan as too broad — pushing LA28 to instead make guarantees to businesses in the city of L.A.

" Los Angeles stands alone in terms of its commitment, its investment and the amount of risk that we're bearing," Harris-Dawson told LAist. "We think every possible avenue ought to be pursued to make sure you leave the people whole, if not better, off, than they were before this started."

LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover told the council Tuesday that LA28 would give L.A. city businesses preferential treatment when awarding contracts.

"When all else is equal between two competing suppliers, we will prioritize City of L.A. suppliers," he said.

Hoover said that focusing exclusively on businesses in the city of L.A. would limit competition for those contracts — and that he wouldn't commit to a plan that would limit LA28's ability to secure the best contract that would be financially responsible.

"If I focus solely, first and foremost, on the city of L.A. for small business, then I am artificially reducing the pool of competition, placing greater risk on the city taxpayers and placing greater risk on the backstop of the city of L.A.," Hoover said.

Council president Harris-Dawson pushed back.

"We'd rather you pay nominally more to a business in the city, than to save $25," Harris-Dawson said. "If you just go for a straight, 'We want the cheapest person in the five-county area,' I can tell you already, you're going to be using a bunch of businesses where the land is cheap and there's no regulation."

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez echoed those concerns, saying that the minimum wage and cost of living in L.A. are higher — meaning that businesses in Los Angeles may charge more.

"The city of L.A. is the financial back-stop to everything that you are doing. And I don't think that has resonated or permeated through you or this whole board that I just frankly don't trust" he said. "We have to go to our constituents and say that we are fighting for them to make sure that they're going to get as much business as they can out of this event."

Millions on the line for the city

The dispute over opportunities for local businesses represents one of many areas where the city and LA28 are at odds.

An important agreement that will dictate which services the city of Los Angeles will provide and how it will be reimbursed is more than six months late. Last week, city councilmember Monica Rodriguez penned a public letter warning Hoover that the Olympics could "bankrupt" the city if that agreement doesn't include adequate protections for the city.

The major concern is who will pay security costs for the Olympics, including LAPD overtime.

The federal government has allocated one billion dollars to security costs for the mega-event, and has put the Secret Service in charge of security planning. Despite those plans, city officials are concerned about who will be left with the bag if the federal funding doesn't come through, or if it doesn't cover all of the city's security costs.

Rodriguez warned that if it isn't changed, the current draft agreement could leave L.A. vulnerable to spending hundreds of millions even if LA28 turns a profit.

Expensive ticket prices are also a sore spot for the city council. Olympics tickets cost up to $5,500 and the cheap $28 tickets went fast in the locals-only pre-sale. Every ticket included a 24% service fee.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky asked Tuesday how much of the service fee would be going to LA28 — a figure that Hoover said he didn't know.

"The tickets are not affordable," she said. "A dollar, which would have actually helped us do some of the things that we know we need to do to get ourselves ready as a city for the Olympics, feels like a drop in the bucket compared to a 24% surcharge."