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- Hacker News
- To me this is one of the reasons that UBI might not be most horrible idea. Sufficiently calibrated UBI would remove this useless work on both sides. Thus making whole system more efficient and maybe even cheaper.by Ekaros
- Treating this as a problem to solve seems like an odd reaction. The public being able to better represent themselves, by making previously difficult content or access paths easier to navigate is a win for the public and therefore a win for the people. Of course, the government may prefer that the public not be able to speak up for itself. This is healthy tension. Honestly, the average person in the public is currently underserved relative to paid lobbyists, resourced activists, lawyers, etc. that know how to engage with the political system in more productive ways.
- Of all the sci-fi things Star Trek predicted, the one that hits hardest is whenever Kirk/Pickard have to have some logical debate with a computer to convince it not to destroy them.
This is the real future, theres no way public services will review every request in the future, everything will be you debating a computer, or you asking your computer to debate their computer.
by jiaosdjf - Or, "LLMs making it increasingly hard for government to categorically deny access to public services" depending on how you want to present the issue.by seiru
- It's becoming obvious that essentially every public-facing organization needs to change. Short story, poetry, essay submissions, comments, reviews, conference paper and journal submissions, polling, job apps, etc.
At this point, I think it's an open question whether there's a scalable way to filter for human effort, that isn't just another layer of AI (e.g. Pangram). I'd love to see something practical come out of this, since the default is probably for public interfaces to just cease to exist, and convert to referral only systems or pure noise.
by Paedor - Seems plainly obvious to me as wellby nonethewiser
- This is something I have been working on. One of the main issues my users have run into is navigation. The Gov. websites often are not very user friendly; so its hard and time consuming to navigate to and apply for the correct services. To address this I have users just speak on their "Intent" for example: "I need help with housing and food assistance, my kid has a peanut allergy and I just lost my job so I don't know what to do."
Note: This is a real request
What happens here it a custom program is created, the program has a protocol that shows exactly how the agent navigates the Gov. system and applies for the benefits. Standard modules are applied to actually do the real work of applying, followups etc...
Despite having a lot of professional experience I have not been able to even get a follow-up interview for a job so I am just pouring my efforts into this.
I have been able to help people get housed, apply for benefits, get into shelters and most recently I started working on erpo.law to speed up and reduce the paperwork on all sides for red flag laws.
Lots of the people that have helped me have done so under the table and not at the approval of their agency heads.
Here is a short vid showing a request that locates an existing program, programs can be codified into re-useable units for people w/ common needs or created in real time... Staffed via O*NET roles that hit real providers I minded from other websites.
Video: https://youtu.be/JOjG71i2F5E
Note: This one matters to me a lot because my mom was in and out of mental institutions my whole life and I been committed before so I really like helping that population because I get it more than most do.
Im also doing city agencies NYC, Boston, Miami, LA, and Vegas to start because they all have their own tld so its easier for me to filter out the bs traffic and bots and stuff.
In terms of scaling human effort the HITL for each module/protocol-chain step can be delegated where needed and the program will persist that prefrence etc...
- It should be more about how Public Services are underfunded and the process for applying and appeals for benefits is designed to be slow to account for this underfunding, but now something has bypassed one part of the design. It should be an argument as to why we need more funding for public services.
- LLMs are just revealing how many systems rely on making applications artificially difficult, either to understand or to generate, to reduce volume. These systems have been failing silently for years, unmuting the alarm is the first step to fixing them.by jjk166
- This is good I think. I have a friend that worked for a Law Firm / NGO / Charity kind of thing, whose primary purpose was writing appeals for benefits to the VA. These were benefits that the person in question was legally entitled to, but required outside legal assistance to actually attain. Regardless of your personal opinion on defense, VA fraud, etc. it would seem good that people who are legally entitled to a benefit are more easily able to attain the benefit.by ecshafer
- I don't understand why this is often portrayed negatively. In general it's important that people can defend their rights, and I find it great that LLMs can help a lot with that. One could introduce page/word/character limits, and note that the other side can use LLMs too to summarize/organize/extract. Overall I think it's great that LLMs now help me to understand and rightfully claim things from insurances, companies, etc.by jbirnick
- Imagine if every time someone reached out to you to ask you a question they did a SAR for all of the information you had on them. They’re technically entitled to do that in many jurisdictions, but it probably won’t help with getting the answer to the question. It’s the same problem as drive by AI PRs except the people receiving them aren’t allowed to ignore them.by maccard
- >I don't understand why this is often portrayed negatively. In general it's important that people can defend their rights, and I find it great that LLMs can help a lot with that.
Well I thought it was self evident. It’s portrayed negatively because it causes a denial of service. You should view this positively if you want worse access to public benefits.
by nonethewiser - LLMs are a magic machine to turn commons into tragedies.
- To be fair, the source mentions the upside ("Although improving Service accessibility is beneficial [...]")
Seems like bureaucracy was added as a subtle way to introduce rate limits, and AI is challenging that mechanism.
by groestl - In my view there are three takeaways from this, all of which are correct:
1. Already strained government services need to bear increasing input, affecting waiting times and employee workloads, which is bad.
2. LLMs are empowering citizens to appeal in a social security landscape which often require expert-level knowledge to navigate, which is good.
3.This phenomenon says more about the complexity of our social security systems than it does about LLMs, hopefully prompting our governments to review and start thinking about social security reform.
by lensecat - > hopefully prompting our governments to review and start thinking about social security reform
I see the opposite, where LLMs and purchased datasets will make it easier for governments to create additional barriers for taxpayers seeking welfare.
by iAMkenough - You forgot:
2b. LLMs are empowering bad actors to exploit loopholes and collect benefits they're not entitled to.
The assumption from a lot of commenters seems to be that these are all legitimate claims and appeals, not a gold rush to get money from the government while the getting's good. In the end it will be the good faith actors that suffer - both those relying on these benefits to survive who will have to jump through more hoops to prove it and those funding the system with their taxes.
by AlexandrB - >2. LLMs are empowering citizens to appeal in a social security landscape which often require expert-level knowledge to navigate, which is good.
Including Voter Roll Purge requests? That’s in the paper as well.
Child protective services has a tip line.
by nonethewiser - I think this is probably a good thing. It’s not just public services, but any company that consumers have to deal with (in ways they don’t want to). Historically, only those with the most time, money, connections, and education have been able to extract benefits from these systems. E.g., if someone wants to fight an insurance claim being denied, they might need to hire an expensive lawyer or spend hours performing their own research.
What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like. Initially, I imagine we’ll start with LLMs on the consumer side debating LLMs on the service side (this is arguably already the case for a few industries). But at some point, unless identical conditions lead to identical outcomes for the people involved, there will be lawsuits. So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.
On the one hand, that has the potential to make things much fairer across economic classes. You don’t get special benefits by having upper class resources. On the other hand, it could lead to increasing the actual requirements for certain benefits, which then reduces class mobility by locking in the benefits to those who already have them, with no clever way to wriggle out of your own level.
I’m just kind of thinking out loud. I don’t know what’s to going to happen long-term, but I think it’s important to monitor these changes carefully as they’re occurring.
by Xcelerate - Maybe there is an economic equalizer, but I feel like Fable is going to win more appeals than GLM 5.2, so perhaps not truly an equalizer. If the LLM you're using to run your appeal is better than the one your insurance company is using to process your appeal, then you have a better chance of winning. So we have an arms race type situation, and money is always good in arms races.by jrockway
- One hypothetical outcome of AI-mediated job loss is that more and more people wind up working in the services (private and public) providing human judgement. Is this person qualified to receive that benefit? Are they truly deserving or just trying to game the system? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if over time we see an explosion in the number of benefits adjudicators or victims services personnel or patient advocates.by derektank
- Yeah, this is going to be interesting. First thing I did with the new Instinct bot was have it generate a property tax value appeal for me. Which will almost definitely go through; it's a slam dunk case but I'd been putting it off for an embarrassingly long time. Now it took me 10 minutes on a Sunday. This is obviously good, but I don't know how public agencies are going to deal with the influx of people trying to get the benefits they are owed, now that they can't rely on red tape and busy schedules to decrease the load.by sbrother
- The endgame is that everything will be gated by costly signals. What will remain costly as LLM's automate white-collar work?
- > So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.
We're seeing how this plays out now in various states that have made their benefits systems nearly impossible to use, which helps them save money by not doling out benefits at all. Having helped some of my elder relatives try to apply for social security payments online makes me very, very concerned about how it's going to look when I'm that age.
The cost of an automated bot that will talk you endlessly in circles until you give up is negligible now.
by CodingJeebus - TBH, most government bureaucracy is just pure overhead connected to a jobs program.
A competent government, focused on delivering the services that citizens are actually entitled to, not on paying clerks or avoiding career-ending events at all costs, would do most of this digitally. And by digitally, I don't mean "you can fill the form online, maybe with some auto-fill and autocomplete suggestions for addresses", I mean just sending you the transfer if you're eligible, automatically fetching all the info they need to see if that is the case. If there even is a form, that's too much overhead.
Even Estonia (and other tech-forward EU governments) don't do this. Poland is considered pretty good on the digital front, but many digital processes still result in a (digitally-transmitted) form being printed in some obscure processing center and manually processed by a clerk during business hours.
by miki123211 - I disagree - this doesn’t make it more accessible for people who don’t have the means, it drowns the receivers in bureaucracy and forces them to do orders of magnitude more work out of a lack of understanding. It’s debatable whether or not these systems are built in good faith to allow benefit claimants to appeal or not, but what will happen here is the appeals process will be clamped down on, hard and heavy.
It’s the equivalent of downloading the entire source code of chrome to access a website. are you entitled to do it? Absolutely. Is it a gigantic pain in the ass for the person who has to serve you the 2GB of source code from their git mirror? Yep
by maccard - > What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like.
A higher fraction of money going into the system is lost to navigating adversarial processes. And probably the occasional person getting in legal trouble for not validating their LLM output before feeding it to a formal process.
For customer-funded things (eg home insurance), this means higher prices for the same in-practice benefits (as distinct from nominal benefits; any gap between nominal and actual benefits will probably end up smaller).
For publicly-funded things (government benefits), this could show as increased budgets for the same result or decreased results on the same budget.
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> So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.
Well, maybe standardization of how employers or doctors or whoever are required to report things to the government.
by tbrownaw