TL;DR

Two councils in the south-west say residents are using AI to write complaints, and that it is pushing up both the number and the complexity of cases. Wiltshire received 783 formal complaints last year, a 27% increase, and is now exploring AI tools of its own to manage them. It is the public-sector version of a pattern already showing up in legal services: AI makes it cheap to write long submissions, and the cost of reading them lands on someone else.

What the councils are seeing

Wiltshire told councillors reviewing its annual complaints report that AI-drafted submissions tend to run much longer. It said they can contain “factual inaccuracies or information that does not fully reflect an individual’s circumstances”, the Local Democracy Reporting Service reported. Adult social care drew the most complaints, with 158 cases.

Over the border in Gloucestershire, Stroud District Council handled over 620 complaints across the past year and answered 55% of them within its published service standards. In a report, Stroud councillors described AI as making complaints “more complex”, and its audit and standards committee is due to discuss the issue.

Fighting AI with AI

The council’s legal and governance director said Wiltshire was looking at how “emerging technologies” could make complaint handling “more efficient and responsive”. Any AI use would “assist” staff rather than “replace them”, the director said, with “appropriate human oversight”. The council says it is already answering more complaints within its target times despite the extra load.

Not everyone is comfortable. Councillor Ruth Hopkinson said: “The thought of AI-generated complaints being responded to by AI-generated responses makes my blood turn cold.”

Looking forward

The same dynamic has appeared elsewhere this month, with one law firm saying buyers’ AI-written questions are delaying house sales. For councils, the risk is a loop in which residents and officers each lean on AI and the actual grievance gets lost between two drafts. “Appropriate human oversight” of AI-assisted replies is the safeguard Wiltshire has promised. Other councils facing the same rise will want to see how well it holds.