AI floods UK councils with complaints⁠.

The Independent reports that public bodies across the UK are receiving far more complaints, as Britons turn to AI to write them¹. Councils, schools and police forces are among the bodies reporting a sharp rise in complaints drafted by large language models¹. The complaints themselves are often needlessly long, inaccurate and full of nonsensical legalese¹.

Experts told the paper that some of the rise is petty and spurious complaining, simply because it now takes so little time¹. Alongside those are people with a real grievance, helped by AI to take part, who now sit in backlogs that the surge has created¹. Employment tribunal claims in the UK rose by 39 per cent from January to March this year, according to data compiled by The Economist, and some claimants are now waiting until 2029 for a hearing¹.

The journalist Sam Freedman called it a collective action problem: for any one person AI makes complaining easier, but if everyone does it, everyone waits longer for a decision¹. Councillor Richard Clewer of the Local Government Association said the longer and more complex complaints are adding to the administrative load at a time of real pressure on resources¹. Caseworkers in MPs' offices told The Independent that around half of the cases they now receive are at least partly written by AI, and described them as verbose and hard to engage with¹.

The consumer campaigner Helen Dewdney, who runs the blog The Complaining Cow, said AI gets a great deal wrong¹. Asked to write a broadband complaint, it threatened Ofcom when the right route was an Alternative Dispute Resolution provider, and gave no advice on gathering evidence¹. She said it works when the writer supplies correct information from reliable sources and asks it only to put the complaint together¹.

Councils are looking at possible future government action so that their rules stay fit for purpose, Mr Clewer said¹. Mr Freedman expects bodies to make complaining harder or to answer complaints with AI, and warned that you cannot simply filter out AI-written ones because some are genuine¹. Do that, he said, and it becomes chatbots talking to each other¹.

Your inbox is next

The story is about the public sector, but nothing in it stops at the town hall. If writing a complaint to a council now takes a minute, so does writing one to your company, your landlord or your supplier. Expect more of them, longer ones, and more that cite rules that do not apply. The awkward part is the one Mr Freedman names: some of the long, odd ones are real, and a customer with a real grievance who gets brushed off will not be pleased to learn a filter did it.

The sensible response is dull. Know how many complaints you get and how long they take, so you can see a rise when it comes. Ask for the facts you need up front, in a short form, rather than reading ten paragraphs to find them. If you do use AI to sort or answer them, keep a person on the ones that matter and check what it says before it goes out. A reply that gets your own obligations wrong is worse than a slow one.

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• Pennsylvania signs a law requiring labels on AI-generated adverts

  Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act, which requires any advert significantly modified or generated by AI to carry a label in the same format as the advert⁴.

• Study finds Grok and GPT pick opposite parties when pushed

  Asked through their APIs who to vote for, Grok 4.7 chose the Republican in 92% of answers and GPT-6.1 Sol the Democrat in 97%, though the consumer apps refused to answer⁵.