Complaints to public services rise in Britain and the US — TechCrunch
In the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries, public services are recording a sharp increase in applications, complaints and other submissions amid the spread of artificial intelligence tools that help fill out forms and prepare documents. TechCrunch reports.
In the United Kingdom, the number of complaints to the Housing Ombudsman more than doubled, from 2,600 in 2022 to more than 7,000 last year. Over the same period, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recorded a fivefold increase in complaints. Similar trends were also observed in court petitions in Brazil and parliamentary petitions in Germany.
84 cases in 11 jurisdictions
Researcher Chris Schmitz describes this trend using the term agentic flooding. In a collection of materials due to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, he examined 84 cases of potential service overload across 11 jurisdictions.
The study covers services ranging from applications for social assistance to formal court appeals. All of them offer online services that could potentially be accessed by an AI assistant. Schmitz does not claim that AI itself directly caused the increase in the number of applicants, but in most cases, the number of submissions was relatively stable until 2022 and then began to grow ever faster alongside the spread of AI technologies.
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According to the researcher, in most of the cases reviewed, this growth has not yet slowed down. He believes that increasingly accessible and advanced AI tools may make it easier for people to prepare submissions: users can paste the text of a document or photograph a letter and receive a response in one step.
Administrative burden
The growing flow of submissions may create an additional burden for institutions that have to review significantly more applications with the same budget. A similar situation occurred last year in vulnerability reward programs: companies received many low-quality reports generated by large language models, but still had to verify them.
At the same time, Schmitz believes that most new submissions to public services are filed by real people who have legitimate grounds to apply. Some of them may previously have refrained from filing documents because of the complexity of the procedure — the so-called administrative burden. In his view, this could be a reason to rethink such processes and adapt services to the use of AI.
