Public services are increasingly strained by LLM-written appeals for benefits

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• Hacker News
• 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
• 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.
  by LurkandComment
• 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
• 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
• 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