‘AI clog’: UK public bodies battle onslaught of chatbot-generated complaints
UK public bodies — including MPs' offices, local councils, schools, and legal services — are reporting a sharp rise in AI-generated correspondence, with complaints and requests becoming more voluminous and harder to process. What began as isolated cases in 2024 has grown into a sustained operational strain on caseworkers and public institutions.
Why this matters: AI is not just changing how governments communicate outward. It is changing what floods in. When anyone can generate a detailed, formally worded complaint in seconds, public offices get buried. That sounds like an efficiency problem, but it is also a fairness one. Real constituents with real problems compete for attention against bulk AI-generated submissions. Caseworkers burn time parsing complex-looking correspondence that may have taken someone thirty seconds to produce. No one decided this was acceptable. It just happened, and public bodies are absorbing the cost.
Who should care: AI governance · Lawyers · Administrators · General readers · Policy
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