alt Hacker NewsCharacterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or, "LLMs making it increasingly hard for government to categorically deny access to public services" depending on how you want to present the issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I began receiving public benefits around 2003. Some of those benefits were granted without any contribution from my side at all. Eventually, when we got into the Section 8 housing and other things, there was a lot of paperwork. The application required gathering together a lot of documentation for my ID, my finances, my household makeup. Initially, it was all manual and on paper, and gradually over those two decades, it moved to electronic online processes.
The case workers and bureaucrats who worked on my case always expressed a lot of relief and encouragement that I was filling out the paperwork well. Being that I could do a lot of things electronically, and use my printer effectively, and just that I already had that mindset where I could fill out lots of forms and collate paperwork from a lot of different sources: I had a distinct leg-up compared to other recipients of public benefits.
A lot of people who are poor, illiterate, ESL, and in stressful living situations are not able to keep up with that paperwork and the bureaucratic requirements, like at all, and that is generally a first-order filter for who's not going to receive the entitlements. However, in my experience, there are usually social workers and specialists available, who can assist in the process, and if someone is in actual need of those benefits, not much will stand in their way of obtaining them.
I have also seen a lot of fraud and waste from the provider side of things. However, I do not believe there is a lot of individual fraud. At least not large-scale stuff. Because it would be difficult to carry through with it. If people are writing up appeals with LLMs, they may already be on a razor's edge of denial. It is definitely a real thing that, if you don't need/deserve the benefits, you can legit get buried in paperwork and dropped into bureaucratic mazes of fool's errands and snipe hunts, and you'll never find the end.
So today, the workflow for entitlements and benefits has moved to a completely electronic, online one, and so anyone who can navigate websites and collate PDFs and fill out web forms, these are the people uniquely advantaged to make use of those benefits. It's great that an LLM can write a cogent appeal and a rationale now. I suppose that the government will find themselves summarizing those with LLMs as well. Good luck!
AI used this way is basically anti-compression of a couple bullet points into pages of slop that either have to be parsed by a poor human or worse thrown into another LLM that tries to recover those poorly thought out bullet points from all the noise.
A few weeks ago a guy came up to me at a coffee shop to ask if I wanted to develop his big AI idea that he’s getting patented soon. Obviously I didn’t want to but during the conversation he spent a lot of time telling me that his big thing these days is getting AI systems to find grant opportunities to generate fraudulent applications to. I have a feeling he was lying or delusional, but he said he’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars from this. (I found it amusing in his job recruitment pitch he spent a lot of time bragging about scamming people.)
A complex application process is basically a proof-of-human-work to rate-limit processing costs (for all applications, successful or not) and benefits cost (for successful applications).
In 2026, you can ask an LLM to fill out the application, reducing the expensive proof-of-human-work to a free or cheap machine proof-of-work.
I can immediately think of three different user stories for LLM-generated applications for, without loss of generality, government benefits:
- Alice is honest and likely eligible but didn't apply because the application process was too time-consuming / complex. With LLM assistance, Alice can now complete the process.
- Bob is honest and likely ineligible but didn't apply because he realized he's probably not eligible. With LLM assistance, Bob can now apply anyway -- "Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks."
- Eve is dishonest and ineligible. Eve wants to make money by lying on her application to defraud the government into paying her benefits. With LLM assistance, Eve can more easily make more convincing applications to more agencies.
An interesting question that doesn't seem to be addressed by the paper is how much of the cost is driven by Alice vs. Bob vs. Eve. We can tell very different stories depending on which is the case:
- Mostly Alice: Our current taxes / budget / etc. can only pay for half of what it would cost to pay everyone entitled to benefits under the law. We quietly disenfranchise citizens of their legal right to receive benefits with a bureaucratic process that half of eligible applicants can't complete, but whoops! now a lot more people can complete it with LLM assistance and we're approving most of them because they're legitimately completing the application process and legitimately entitled to benefits. Financially it's killing us to pay what the government promised to all those people to whom it was promised.
- Mostly Bob: A lot more people are applying because LLM's make it super easy for anyone to apply. We don't approve many more applications than we did before -- but each year has about 1,000,000 more applications and 990,000 more denials than the previous year for three years running. Financially it's killing us to pay the processing costs for all those unsuccessful applications.
- Mostly Eve: We're seeing an uptick in applications that are immediately denied, or approved but later revoked, because of fraud. LLM's are making it easier for criminals to defraud the government. Financially it's killing us because we pay those fraudulent benefits before we know they're fraudulent; recovery of funds is slow and uncertain once the fraud is discovered; and fraud imposes additional costs of investigation, prosecution, and punishment.
When an immovable object meets an unstoppable force.
Hackernews wrestles with AI slop vs. public benefits.
The people who need this additional help to access water/power/internet/etc often have the most barriers to being able to complete the necessary steps to access benefits. This is a great use of the technology.
This is a bad thing. It means public services will ultimately deploy AI to respond to those requests, and people will be denied instantly with no recourse or human oversight, it will be tyranny of the machine.
Was it intentionally made difficult to communicate with the government and LLMs are just not sensitive to the artificial friction?
"Flooding" implies some nefarious purpose. There's no evidence of that in this paper. Maybe these agents are finally giving people who could never find the time, resources, knowledge, etc. to engage with the system.
"Public services are increasingly becoming more accessible with LLMs" How about that as the title?
They also have zero evidence that this is because of LLMs. They just got some data related to volume, did a really crappy analysis that wouldn't even stand up as an intro to stats course project, and declared their biased opinion as likely true.
AI destroys everything. It's such spammy trash.
>Reduce the Expected Benefit.
This could be the chance to reverse America out of becoming a welfare state.
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.