HR Teams Are Drowning in Slop Grievances (ft.com) 37
Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country -- and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabricated case law.
Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings "confidently incompetent" -- superficially persuasive even to lawyers. The flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system: Ministry of Justice figures show new employment cases rose 33% in the three months to September, even as concluded cases fell 10% year over year.
Investor Marc Andreessen, quipping on X: Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Marginal cost of arguing is going to zero."
Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings "confidently incompetent" -- superficially persuasive even to lawyers. The flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system: Ministry of Justice figures show new employment cases rose 33% in the three months to September, even as concluded cases fell 10% year over year.
Investor Marc Andreessen, quipping on X: Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Marginal cost of arguing is going to zero."
confidently incompetent (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
"Throw out anything generated by AI" - Does this apply to the HR people and their forms? That would level the playing field and eliminate a lot of the problems on both sides
Re: (Score:2)
As long as there is no meaningful penalty! (Score:2)
Re: As long as there is no meaningful penalty! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Yea, but that's purely academic if you can't tell who is doing it because their identity is being shielded from you by the giant megacorp that owns the AI actually sending all the trash your way.
Same thing is happening in the lettings world (Score:5, Interesting)
I rent out a house in England and the tenant had a (reasonable) complaint. She emailed 3000 words to the managing agent. The agent sent her a 2000 word reply. This bounced back and forth a bit with each sending long emails with bullet points and the like. My guess is that both of them were using ChatGPT both to compose their own emails and to summarise the replies they got.
In frustration, she phoned me to complain and got what she wanted in less than 60 seconds. In my opinion, we will see much more examples like this where AI is reducing efficiency and lowering productivity.
Re: (Score:2)
I rent out a house in England and the tenant had a (reasonable) complaint. She emailed 3000 words to the managing agent. The agent sent her a 2000 word reply. This bounced back and forth a bit with each sending long emails with bullet points and the like. My guess is that both of them were using ChatGPT both to compose their own emails and to summarise the replies they got.
In frustration, she phoned me to complain and got what she wanted in less than 60 seconds. In my opinion, we will see much more examples like this where AI is reducing efficiency and lowering productivity.
This is more likely the agent running interference as they don't want to pay for anything (as do most of their customers). They would have kept doing it if they had of phoned the agent. Few tenants in a property managed by an agent get a direct line to the landlord, doubly so for one who'll make a decision, especially a decision to spend money on a rental property when they don't have to.
Also 3000 words isn't hard to do, especially if you're an experienced typist or writer. However when dealing with issu
Simple and quick... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect most are not necessarily false, just vague or opaque, using ambiguous language or hard-to-verify claims.
Re: (Score:3)
Solution: dismiss with prejudice any complaint which includes such falsities.
... and then the person files a lawsuit, alleging that HR ignored their complaint. That becomes expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
It's simply a matter of having a clear policy stating any complaint with verifiably false info will be dismissed.
Going to end badly (Score:5, Interesting)
Presumably, any protections that exist for employees filing grievances do not protect those employees when they file provably false statements. I can imagine many HR teams, once they realize the gift they have been handed, will be reacting with glee as they receive a free pass to bin off what they likely already perceive as troublemakers instead of having to walk on eggshells when disciplining them.
This is good (Score:2)
A group that deserves slop! (Score:2, Insightful)
I have very little respect for corporate HR and in particular their ability to adequately handle employee grievances. So if they're getting drowned in AI Slop, I'm inclined to think "And That's A Good Thing."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have very little respect for corporate HR and in particular their ability to adequately handle employee grievances.
That isn't their goal. Their entire reason for existing is to protect the company. The company pays them, they do what the company wants.
When HR helps an employee, it's because the employee's situation has become a threat to the company. If you can find a way to phrase your problem in those terms, then HR will resolve your problem. Otherwise they'll try to make it go away (which might mean making you go away).
More accurate title (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
More likely, they are a litigant in person because lawyers are expensive. Filling out an ET1 is not easy if you are not a lawyer, so people resort to using AI. If you are on a zero-hours contract and your last employer didn't pay you your last paycheck for say £400, you are not hiring a lawyer, but that £400 quid is actually going to make a big difference to your finances.
That said, my brother (an actual Employment Tribunal Judge in the UK) tells me he has caught legal firms using AI
Applicant's AI talking with recruiter's AI (Score:5, Funny)
Original post (not by me):
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/... [linkedin.com]
Pasted text parts.
My team caught someone who sent an AI to interview in their place.
It sounds so crazy that I didn't believe it until I reviewed the transcripts:
Interviewer: "Can you tell us about yourself?"
Candidate: "Absolutely! I'm a passionate professional who thrives in dynamic environments."
Interviewer: "That's a really insightful answer."
Candidate: "Thank you! You're absolutely right."
Interviewer: "You're absolutely right too."
Candidate: "You're absolutely right about that."
Interviewer: "We're both absolutely right."
Interviewer: "This is going really well."
Candidate: "It really is."
Interviewer: "You're absolutely right."
Candidate: "You're absolutely right."
Interviewer: "You're absolutely right."
Candidate: "You're absolutely right."
The transcript goes on like this for 14 more pages.
Thank goodness we're using AI to screen our candidates, otherwise we might have wasted our time talking to someone who can't even be bothered to show up to a call.
Re:Applicant's AI talking with recruiter's AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
"For an extra $99.95 would you like a blow-job?"
Should Not Be A Problem (Score:3)
This should not be a problem at all. As soon as these white collar jobs(lawyers and HR) are replaced their relacement AIs should be able to process and sort out the details in seconds.
IT WORKS!
as long as their signed. (Score:1)
If they're signed, drop them in their HR file, and then fire them for fraud.
Seems fair (Score:3)
Non-AI solution to the rescue (Score:2)
Create a non-AI-based (thus much more efficient) tool that scans filings for case citations and checks them against the legal records. Flag any that don't exist. For those that do, provide the language around the citation saying what the filing claims that case says and the actual judgement part of the case on record for a human to review. That'll make it quick to flag citations that don't say what the filing claims they say. Anything flagged results in an automatic dismissal of the case and sanctions again
Re: (Score:3)
In the context of the story, Employment Tribunals in the United Kingdom, the Judge will instantly spot any dodgy citations. Basically, all the useful citations are known to the judges already, so anything they don't recognise they will look up. Of course, they have access to a computerised database of all the cases, so looking things up takes mere seconds.
How do I know this? My brother is, in fact, an Employment Tribunal Judge in the UK, and he told me at Christmas that he had already seen a legal firm doin
Easy to solve (Score:2)
Just use AI to process the complaint. If AI judges it to be valid, dispatch a robot to usher the accused employee to the door. What could be simpler?
Readers of Slashdot and HN are drowning ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... AI stories.
We all know the emperor has no clothes. We know the "stories" are PR pieces from AI boosters. We know that autocorrect can't replace anybody whose job doesn't involve following an exact script or redoing work that already exist.
Just stop it. Stop promulgating the nonsense. There is no "I" in AI and there is no creativity in the autocorrect that they're pushing on us.
In the meantime we're paying higher electricity costs and having to hold off purchases of equipment or pay extortionate prices for RAM and disks.
All so some billionaires can add a few zeros.
I'm retired, no job to be replaced by the stochastic musings of an over-sold Excel spreadsheet. Just sick of the lies and marketing nonsense. Sick of the slop in the music and writing spheres. Sick of the "I made a C compiler from scratch" lies.
And yes, you can get off my lawn.
Cry me a river (Score:2)
Hold on, let me get out my extremely tiny violin...
AI slop costs someone, somewhere (Score:2)
The article starts with "HR departments" then switches to "MoJ" as the long-suffering victim. I'll address the MoJ side of the issue.
No, the cost of arguing is being pushed from the person with AI tools (plaintiff) to the government. Government itself, is suffering from the labour-into-capital leverage. It's needs to control that transfer of costs. Such as, the lodgement fee depends on the number of pages submitted in the article: The government can set a pages per infraction cost. Then, plaintiffs