UK Treasury Sparks Row Over Use of AI To Handle Taxpayer Complaints

Civil servants in the UK are locked in a row with the government over plans to use AI to answer taxpayer complaints. The Telegraph: Letters and emails to the Treasury are already being read by an AI tool which summarises the contents and suggests responses for civil servants. The government is now in talks to use AI across more departments, The Telegraph understands. A government spokesman said: "We make no apology for exploring innovations which improve public services. This tool has already been in use for four months and has increased productivity by 30pc, helping us save taxpayers' money by stopping the need to use expensive contractors during busy periods.

"Staff at the Treasury will continue to write all public correspondence and make decisions on cases. This tool, which was developed by data science experts in the department, helps civil servants respond to thousands more questions quickly and on time." But the civil serrvice trade body, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, warned that the AI tool could be developed "on the cheap," leading to correspondence being misread. Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, said that while the union has no objection in principle to AI, that training the tool "properly takes a long time and considerable resources." Ms Heathcote added: "Further, in anticipation of AI working well, staff numbers are cut so you get the worst of all worlds: a poorly functioning AI system with too few humans left behind to pick up the broken pieces."

Hallucinations

[Cyberax]

I can already imagine the AI advice like: "to minimize your tax bill, list your children as pets".

Re:

[Tablizer]

You mean that's wrong?

No hallucinations

[mmell]

The advice will be correct, if (possibly) illegal. IANATL, but I don't think you're allowed to claim non-amortizable capital losses as routine deprecation, nor are you allowed to arbitrarily elevate them to the status of living things. They're just children. Get over it.

innit guvna

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Finally, a headline about a "row" from a country that actually uses that word to mean "a fight".

Re:

[kmoser]

I sure hope so, because normally "Sparks row" could just as easily be misinterpreted to refer to Apache Spark and database rows.

Lost in Translation

[Roger W Moore]

Finally, a headline about a "row" from a country that actually uses that word to mean "a fight".

It doesn't mean a fight, it means an argument, usually a noisy one, e.g. the neighbours had a bit of a row last night. You would not normally take that to mean they were actually fighting each other, just arguing.

Re:

[Pseudonymous Powers]

My cultural misunderstanding of what a row is is an excellent reason for them not to use it in headlines in my culture.

Re:

[mjwx]

Finally, a headline about a "row" from a country that actually uses that word to mean "a fight".

It doesn't mean a fight, it means an argument, usually a noisy one, e.g. the neighbours had a bit of a row last night. You would not normally take that to mean they were actually fighting each other, just arguing.

I think the GP might be from a country where "fight" also means "argument".

Aside from that, 100% correct. A row in British English (pronounced row as in cow, not row as in tow) is a typically public argument or dispute that is often acrimonious. Over here, fight usually refers to the violent kind.

How can I have any pudding?

[byronivs]

You know the rest.

Units

[manu0601]

This tool has already been in use for four months and has increased productivity by 30pc

Improved by 30 parsec? I wonder if an AI could write that one.

Re:

[test321]

The answers are now typed in at a speed of 30 pico velocity of light, which is about 9 mm/s

Re:

[cstacy]

This tool has already been in use for four months and has increased productivity by 30pc

Improved by 30 parsec? I wonder if an AI could write that one.

Navigating the tax code ain't like dustin' crops or giving vacation advice, boy. One small slip and you could come out in the middle of a prison yard.

This LLM knows how to hop a variable non-linear path through a hyperdimensional space. We made the SA100 run in 30 parsecs!

Re:

[kmoser]

If by "productivity" they mean "complaints answered per unit time" then I'm sure it has increased productivity. The real question is, how many *helpful* and *correct* responses has it given per unit time, compared to human operators?

Is this an improvement over boilerplate letters

[Retired Chemist]

Is this an improvement over boilerplate letters that usually fail to address the issue, which seems to be the historical government response to questions? If some actually reads the letters before they are sent, it might just be a time saver. How long though before some overworked underpaid clerk stops bothering to check the results.

don't pay?

[wyHunter]

I think British taxpayers should simply stop paying taxes. And, perhaps even better, decamp to a country with freedom of expression.