Reported by The Guardian
MPs, local authorities, lawyers, schools and more are receiving floods of grievances, requests and legal challenges, often complex to read and respond to
“I t started as a trickle in 2024 and now it’s an onslaught.” Hollie Wickens, a senior caseworker in a Labour MP’s office, is explaining the daily reality of dealing with surging volumes of artificial intelligence-generated correspondence.
“Half the emails we receive are some form of AI,” she says, adding that this has made requests and complaints much more complex and time-consuming to read and deal with, despite her decade of experience in the role. “It is definitely more taxing.”
More from the original report
At the start of this decade, applying for a job, writing a complaint or objecting to a local planning application typically required considerable effort: time to research a topic, fill in a form or write a formal-sounding email, with specialist knowledge often also required.
That was until the rapid growth of ChatGPT – which turns four later this month – Claude, Copilot, Gemini and other generative AI tools over the past couple of years. These chatbots are helping turn laypeople into experts by giving access to a free – albeit sometimes unreliable – legal adviser, administrator or personal assistant.
The developers of AI tools promised huge productivity gains for employers and their staff: dull, routine tasks could be automated and carried out far more quickly, giving the human workforce more time for creative endeavours. There are signs of those gains in parts of the economy, with AI credited for some of this year’s better than expected UK GDP growth.
However, UK businesses, local authorities, courts, schools and other public bodies are reporting being swamped by a flood of AI-generated complaints, letters and legal challenges that are massively increasing their workload , at a time of already stretched resources .
With the concept of low-quality “AI slop” now mainstream, organisations are sounding the alarm that their operations are being gummed up by ever greater volumes of correspondence.
These only take moments for users to create, but huge amounts of time for human employees to sift through and respond…