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As AI makes it easier to fill forms and file complaints, public services around the world are seeing enormous jumps in applications and other requests. In the United Kingdom, complaints to the housing ombudsman more than doubled since the introduction of ChatGPT, rising from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year. The United States’ Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) saw 5x growth in complaints over the same period. There were similar jumps in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions. Researcher Chris Schmitz is tracking this rise as part of a broader trend he called “agentic flooding.” In a paper set to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, he looks at 84 different cases of potential flooding across 11 jurisdictions, finding broad evidence that AI tools are changing the way people interact with public services. The harder question is what to do in response. While some of the new filings are clearly adversarial, others are the result of legitimate applicants using AI to file claims that would otherwise be abandoned. While some might see the new applications as AI-generated spam, Schmitz sees it as a rare opportunity to remake social services for the AI era. Schmitz looked at services ranging from welfare applications to official judicial appeals, but they all have online services that could be accessed by an AI assistant. (The full dataset is hosted here, for reference.) For methodological reasons, Schmitz’s paper stops short of saying AI is directly causing the surge of new applicants. But most of the 84 cases follow the same basic arc, where submissions were roughly flat before 2022, then rose at increasing speed as AI technology diffuses. Crucially, most cases have not seen that growth slow down, suggesting it will likely keep rising for years to come. For Schmitz, it’s easy to see how the increasing skills and availability of AI would drive increased usage. “People are finding out that this is something one can do, and incrementally, it is just getting easier to do it … before it might have been a question of a lot of dragging context together and prompting ChatGPT 3.5 very precisely, it may now be a question of just pasting or taking a photo of a letter with your Claude app and getting a pretty good response in one shot,” he said. The jump in volume is similar to what many bug-bounty services also experienced last year, as companies found their inboxes flooded with low-quality reports generated by LLMs. The reports rarely contained significant security issues, but companies were still obligated to vet the reports as they came in, presenting a significant drain on resources. It’s easy to imagine public services facing a similar problem, as they manage 5x more applicants with the same budget. But where the bug bounty programs were flooded with worthless submissions, Schmitz says most of the new applications to public services are coming from real people with legitimate claims. “The vast majority of cases we find are people who are entitled to claim for something, claiming for that thing,” he told TechCrunch. If those people weren’t claiming the benefits before, it may have been because the work of applying was too forbidding — something known in the policy world as administrative burden. Now that AI can lift that burden, it could be an opportunity to remake many of these services in a more AI-friendly way. It’s a major task, which we mostly haven’t begun to tackle, but Schmitz sees it as reason for optimism. “A big part of making AI go well is being able to detail out what the good version of things looks like. And anyone who’s ever used ChatGPT to do the tax return knows that there’s a good version here where you’re being helped,” Schmitz says. “This could be the moment to say, ‘we need to rethink pretty much everything about how this process looks.’”
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