- Councils, authorities and caseworkers are struggling to filter through AI generated complaints
- AI makes complaining easier and that is contributing to backlogs in responses and the court system
- Workers are facing growing workloads without any extra budget
UK public bodies are struggling to deal with a veritable deluge of complaints that have exploded in both number and length with many public servants placing the blame squarely on the popularity of AI chatbots.
AI isn’t immune to mistakes, and that is complicating things further. Believing AI to be an expert in all subjects, many are trusting their chatbots to write a perfect, irrefutable complaint — forgetting that AI can hallucinate or reference sources that may not necessarily be relevant.
This is resulting in an ‘AI clog’ that is stretching budgets to the breaking point and causing a significant headache for courts and lawyers who have to sift through correspondence full of AI slop legalese.
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AI correspondence clogs complaints
“Half the emails we receive are some form of AI,” Hollie Wickens, a senior caseworker in a Labour MP’s office, told the Guardian, “It is definitely more taxing.”
In the pre-AI era, submitting a complaint took time and required research and a level of expertise. This level of effort acted as a natural filter to spurious complaints. But the release of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to the general public has made it almost effortless to draft and submit a complaint to almost anyone.
But on the other end, human complaints handlers have to sift through a growing number of AI generated complaints with the same regard they would have for a human complaint, filtering out AI slop to get to the bottom of an issue.
In many cases, the complaints are “very long, repetitive and contain unrelated comments or misdirected demands,” Evans explained. “You get some huge ones. The worst one I’m aware of at the moment is about 200 pages long.”
With the UK still facing a significant backlog on court cases, businesses battling legal complaints are having to spend significant amounts of money on cases brought against them by former employees using AI.
One business founder who is facing such a challenge said, “Everyone’s got a free lawyer now,” referring to how AI chatbots are making it easier to draft legal documents on behalf of plaintiffs.
Companies and authorities are contemplating a range of ways to deal with a growing backlog of AI generated complaints. Some are looking at enacting word limits on complaint forms to cut down on repetitive AI generated complaints, or moving complaints to a template form rather than a simple text box.
But another option is to use AI to help sift through and summarize complaints, but that comes with its own AI-related issues.
Some UK councils have already brought AI tools into workflows to help summarize information and draft documents and emails, helping authorities to respond more accurately and at greater speed, but the problem of people trusting AI to do everything perfectly is the main problem that needs to be addressed.
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benedict.collins@futurenet.com (Benedict Collins)
