City council bosses are being urged to measure how many complaints are being written using AI – with a warning that long, legally dense submissions are taking up significant amounts of officers’ time.
Edinburgh City Council is to consider a request by Conservative councillor Jo Mowat on Thursday to investigate how people are using the technology to draft complex complaints and inquiries, which may be clogging up the system.
Councillor Mowat, who represents the city centre ward, has tabled a motion for the full council meeting asking the chief executive to report back on the issue to the policy and sustainability committee.
The motion says public bodies are seeing a growing number of AI-generated complaints, which tend to be very lengthy and cover several scenarios at once.
They can also contain inaccurate information, including ‘halluncinated’ cases cited in support of the complaint, as well as detailed references to legal cases that staff then have to check.
According to the motion, such complaints can run to many thousands of words, and each point raised must be checked and answered. In one case, it says, preparing a response took two officer days.
Because the council is under a duty to address every point raised in a complaint, the motion argues that the trend is “putting pressure on services”.
The motion states: “Public bodies are seeing an increasing number of AI-generated complaints being submitted. These tend to be very lengthy, each covering a number of scenarios, may contain erroneous information in the form of hallucinated cases to support their complaint and detailed references to legal cases which require to be checked. The complaints can run to many thousands of words and require significant amounts of officer time to go through each point raised and check and address them – one case required two officer days to prepare a response.”
Her motion asks for a report comparing the number of suspected AI-generated complaints with other complaints, setting out the resource implications, and examining whether the council’s experience matches that of other public bodies.
It would also look at whether SOLACE, which represents local authority chief executives, or COSLA, the umbrella group for local government in Scotland, is working on a sector-wide response.
The motion refers to guidance issued by the Information Commissioner in May. That month, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office published guidance for public authorities facing a rise in AI-generated Freedom of Information requests, covering requests that misquote or misinterpret FOI legislation and the growing number that need clarifying before they can be answered.
In Scotland, the Scottish Information Commissioner has separately published guidance for people considering using AI to make FOI requests, warning that such requests can be unnecessarily complex, hard for public bodies to understand, or contain incorrect information.
Futurescot has contacted Cllr Mowat and the City of Edinburgh Council for comment.