5 ms·

The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

146 points by simonpure 2mo ago

Versipelle 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/mi3zu https://archive.ph/mi3zu
dozerly 2mo ago
Maybe we need a better-scaling legal system that does not take years to resolve simple disputes. I am not convinced AI can replace lawyers, but more people having access to the law without extremely costly fees does sound good to me.
- MichaelZuo 2mo ago
  I don’t see how that helps? A lawyer isn’t going to sign on to take liability risk unless they spend quite a lot of time analyzing the AI’s outputs for possible blunders? So it structurally can’t cost significantly less.
  - throwaway89864 2mo ago
    Lawyers normally don't have any liability risks, no? And reputational risks are very limited, a lawyer can always point to a judge, to the other lawyer, to circumstances, and away from their own (or the AI's output) blunder.
    - MichaelZuo 2mo ago
      Representing anyone in a court room by definition carries liability risks, because the judge can punish the lawyer unilaterally, but not the AI.
    - watwut 2mo ago
      Layer can be disbarred. And judges do not accept "ai did it therefore I, the layer am not responsible for the false claim" as an excuse from layers.
      - throwaway89864 2mo ago
        Realistically a lawyer never gets disbarred. There is no incentive to disbar a lawyer, and a single client usually wouldn't know if a lawyer is consistant in his/her misconduct, judges can't care less and wouldn't go against their friends/buddies, no?
- jay_kyburz 2mo ago
  The answer is in the article. There needs to be a financial mechanism to deter nuance complaints. A small penalty for lodging a complaint and losing. This fee should help pay for the courts and reimburse and employer for time spent defending itself. (With the judge / magistrate able to wave the fee on compassionate grounds)
  - teddyh 2mo ago
    s/nuance/nuisance/
  - simonjgreen 2mo ago
    This is a thing, and in the context of the article too. In UK, if an employment tribunal finds you’ve wasted the tribunals time they can and do order costs paid for both the tribunal and other party. Odd they don’t mention it.
    - BrenBarn 2mo ago
      As with most such things, though, what is needed are escalating penalties. If you're a Joe Schmo who files a complaint that turns out to be invalid, no penalty for you. If you're a rich jerk who files a bunch of such complaints, a few million maybe. If you're a giant company that is using the legal system to push people around, $50 billion.
      - simonjgreen 2mo ago
        Again, this is covered, to an extent. Speaking only for England & Wales, the courts have pretty broad costs powers. Especially if one party is bringing litigation unreasonably. There’s no ceiling to it either, it just has to be defensible. It’s also on the court system to leverage procedure correctly to add safeguards against the kind of behaviour you describe. I understand anecdotally the US system is more open to abuse of this nature, but I don’t know the details. This article though was specific to UK.
  - tchalla 2mo ago
    In Germany, the losing party pays 3x the court costs. The only issue is that everyone gets paid - the lawyer, the court etc. The only person that doesn’t get paid for their time investment is the person who is suing.
- newyankee 2mo ago
  With frontier models, I have found so many self contradicting points in Indian tax law that I would rather welcome a good AI helping to reduce discretionary powers of officers via highly subjective interpretations. This power asymmetry is basically the driver for a lot of developing world corruption.
  - perching_aix 2mo ago
    I've been thinking about autoformalizing local laws using agents into TLA+ or something, but it's sufficiently past enough my actual skillset that I'm pretty sure I'd just end up wrestling with slop like a pig in the mud. It's a shame though, I consider law to be just kind of a shitty codebase, with natural language being tortured into cooperating, so it's a really natural fit. I'll probably yield to my temptations eventually and proceed anyways. Lord help me from all the creative but completely detached interpretations I'll land on.
    - arionhardison 2mo ago
      I did this for a few federal agencies, here a few examples https://ice.dhs.dev/program/13732-human-trafficking-investigation https://ice.dhs.dev/program/13732-human-trafficking-investig... https://atf.doj.dev/program/44825-open-gun-store-need-ffl https://atf.doj.dev/program/44825-open-gun-store-need-ffl LMK if you want to know more.
      - perching_aix 2mo ago
        I do, though I'm not entirely sure what am I looking at on those links. Could you start by explaining that? They look like training courses or something. I saw a sequence diagram browsing around, seemed to be specific to a sample scenario?
        arionhardison 2mo ago
        tl;dr a "program" here is a government program (get an FFL, file a discrimination charge, apply for a benefit), codified so that every step has an actor, typed inputs and outputs, and a citation to the provision that authorizes it. Agents then walk each party through it. And note it points the opposite way from ChatGPT-drafts-your-tribunal-claim in TFA: that dynamic broke because AI made filing free while adjudicating stayed expensive, so the queue explodes. Codifying the procedure attacks the other side; what's actually required, where it actually goes, and whether you have it; before it becomes a hearing in 2030. Fair question, and the "training course" read is not an accident; it's the same shape underneath. A program is an ordered chain of modules, each with a declared actor and typed inputs/outputs. Courses are also that. So it renders with the same components. The sequence diagram you found isn't a sample scenario, it's the deal template's actual step graph; the thing an instance runs on. Three authored files per domain: - an ontology: the domain's vocabulary, its regulatory frameworks with real citations, the O*NET occupations that staff it, the systems of record it touches - intents: what a person actually shows up wanting ("open a gun store, need an FFL"), with typed parameters - deal templates, one per intent: ordered pipeline_steps, each with an actor, inputs, outputs, and a policy_check The page you clicked is generated from the last two deterministically. No model in that path. The part that speaks to your TLA+ instinct: I deliberately don't formalize what the law means. I formalize the procedure, and bind each step to the provision that authorizes it. Formalizing semantics is exactly where you get the creative, detached interpretations you're worried about, because every gap gets filled by the model's guess. Formalizing procedure asks the model to transcribe and cite, which is checkable: - every step input is a ref; param:x, step:3.some_output, system:NICS.event; and it has to resolve. A step: ref must name an earlier step's declared output, so the dataflow is a DAG with referential integrity. - every step's policy_check must name a framework declared in the ontology. A step that no provision authorizes fails validation. So most hallucination becomes a build error instead of a plausible sentence. That's the whole trick. Not a smarter model; a narrower artifact. Concretely, since you're right to expect slop: my first pass at four new agencies came back with 100% of step inputs referencing parameters that didn't exist, and prompts that literally said "Subject?". The validator refused all forty programs. That's the mechanism working; I'd have merged them on a read-through. Intents and flows for ATF, if you want to see the layer under the program page: https://wiki.doj.dev/agent/atf https://wiki.doj.dev/agent/atf Limits, since you'll ask. It decides nothing; no adjudication, and consequential steps are human-gated. It's also not a formal method: the invariants are referential integrity and citation binding, not model checking. The genuinely temporal parts are the deadlines, and those do bite; the NLRB's six-month charge window runs from filing and service, with service being the filer's own duty, so a filing-date-only clock computes the wrong date on a deadline that destroys the claim if you miss it. Re: the sibling comment about discretion; that's the actual pitch. Discretion hides in the gap between the written rule and the practiced procedure. Writing the practiced procedure down, with a citation per step, is what makes the gap visible.
- majormajor 2mo ago
  Moving from an adversarial each-party-has-lawyers-presenting-as-extreme-a-case-as-possibly-can-be-made-for-their-side system to something more like expert arbitrators and independent/court fact-finders would avoid the 'bury them in paperwork and filings' lawyer-cost explosions. Usually the concerns I've seen are around the lines of "the experts are gonna favor the powerful incumbents who they see a lot" buttttt if our system is already doing that AND costing way more anyway, barring entry entirely to many, is that so much worse? Even assuming we can't try to regulate that?
  - eddythompson80 2mo ago
    How is that different from the current system? Wouldn’t you just bury those fact-finders in paperwork? Or are you trying to shift the cost and responsibility of the discovery phase to the court instead? Would the court pass it through to the plaintiffs/defendants like the lawyers do or is it just covered by the state?
    - dghlsakjg 2mo ago
      We have quite a few tribunals, ombudspeople, and other non court dispute resolution services in Canada. Typically, the arbitrator is very well versed in the rules/area they are enforcing, and can see right through a snow job. In my province there is a tenancy tribunal that has to make a ruling before a court gets involved, and the courts rarely disagree with a decision made by the arbitrator in the 1% of cases that do get appealed. Because the rules are so clear, you can shovel piles of paperwork at them, and they will ignore it because they know what pieces of paper they actually need to make their decision. It isn't for complex big money cases, but it means that courts have more time for those cases because they aren't dealing with ticky tacky minor disputes over damage deposits and fender benders. Tenancy arbitration is just one of them, BTW. Just about every industry or agency has an outside ombudsperson that is the first step of dispute resolution before a court will be interested.
      - rob74 2mo ago
        Sounds good, but what's to stop the party with more money to appeal the ombudsperson decision if it's not to their liking and then apply the "we have a whole legal department for this" strategy?
- inigyou 2mo ago
  AI doesn't give you a lawyer service without fees though. It makes you feel like you're getting a lawyer service, then you show up in court and say what the AI tells you to say and lose ten times your net worth because what the AI told you to say was legally nonsense.
  - raincole 2mo ago
    The theoretical system can't be "court." I mean it literally can't. If the cost to file legal cases is actually low then there won't be enough judges to handle them.
mwkaufma 2mo ago
Tellingly, the legal tendency The Economist finds alarming involves workers asserting their rights.
- keeda 2mo ago
  TFA ends on this note though, which seems pro-labor: > But it would present employers with a different problem. If AI fulfils its promise, it could before long give every worker the equivalent of a top-flight lawyer in their pocket, able to file precisely constructed cases against their bosses at will. A deluge of slop claims could give way to a wave of winning ones. Labour said its act would shift power from employers to workers. With AI, power will move faster and further than the politicians imagined.
- Gander5739 2mo ago
  From the article: "Free, AI-powered legal advice should be good news for workers. Instead, it is proving to be a tragedy of the commons. For workers with genuine grievances, the surge in demand means longer waits for justice. For employers, it means bigger legal bills to respond to claims, both well-founded or fantastical. In the age of AI, a system intended to provide access to justice suffers from, if anything, too much access."
  - theptip 2mo ago
    I found this article quite myopic. This is not a “tragedy of the commons”, it’s just a deficit of state capacity. The state needs to use AI to make bureaucracy instantaneous. That’s the only option, unless you ban AI for this kind of thing (not gonna happen).
    - zdragnar 2mo ago
      State capacity is a common good though, and AI makes abusing it much easier.
      - breezybottom 2mo ago
underlipton 2mo ago
I'll read the article once I can get past the paywall, but something important to note in the meantime: "The tragedy of the commons" was debunked years ago: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false... The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
- Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
  Isn't Ostrom just saying that with effective regulations informed by local knowledge, it is possible for shared resources to be successfully managed? The "tragedy of the commons" is just what happens in the absence of effective rules governing the use of a resource when individuals are free to act in their own interests.
  - KaiserPro 2mo ago
    I grew up near a place that still had a common, the list of bylaws was massive. I think it was >40 and was prominently displayed on the entrance. The thing is, like most commons, the land was maybe not directly owned, but there was a management responsibility. as in it was owned by the crown but was granted for the use of the towns folk so long as Harry Big Cheese to hunt thrice a year at some obscure feast day. the point was, management was there, and enforced. Any common that didn't have effective management would fall foul of its rights and legal action would be taken. Or riots. Common land is owned, but there are group rights.
  - underlipton 2mo ago
    That's not a "tragedy of the commons," then. It's a "tragedy of ineffective governance." And governance doesn't have to be top-down.
- 2mo ago
jmyeet 2mo ago
So I have to wonder if this article written about clogging up employment courts with AI-generated cases is itself generated because the premise (in the title and the article) refers to the "tragedy of the commons", which was debunked almost 20 years ago. For a bit of history, the term was the title of a 1968 essay [1] based in part on ideas that originated earlier. It becamse popular as a driver for privatization of government services in many Western nations based on the (flawed) idea that privatization would increase "efficiency". All it did was transfer wealth from customers with inelastic demand to newly-minted private owners. But it never seemed to match reality. The opposite seemed to be true: private resources became over-exploited whereas shared or public resources were successfully managed and shared by communities across the world in some cases going back centuries. This culminated in Elinor Ostrom [2] winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for officially debunking the idea. Now I understand how ordinary people still quote this debunked idea. It did become popular. But journalists, particularly those for a publication called The Economist, should know better. [1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago
  It's the first time I hear something like this; if that's true, then this must be one major case of meaning shift, because since forever I've known and used and seen used this term to refer to the flaws of privatization. The solution to tragedy of the commons is literally a central authority. It's, like, the opposite of "driver of privatization".
  - ang_cire 2mo ago
    Tragedy of the Commons was specifically the idea that cooperation would fail due to selfish competition, so some force was needed to administer it. Economists used it to argue both for privatization and against, but always for top-down, authoritative control. In the US, it was almost always used as an anti-"socialist" argument for privatization, by arguing that the free market would in fact be an analogue for the "natural" competition, because as we all know the Free Market always finds the most equitable and consumer-desired outcome. I'd imagine in Europe it was more common to argue for government management.
sscaryterry 2mo ago
https://archive.is/mi3zu https://archive.is/mi3zu
suoloordi 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/mi3zu https://archive.ph/mi3zu
simonw 2mo ago
> AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030. This is an example of a larger pattern: AI assistance breaks any human system which was designed for a world in which bureaucratic friction keeps volume manageable. Turns out that's a whole lot of human systems.
jackvalentine 2mo ago
Even the “pre-case” legal stuff is out of control. In my Australian organisation we’ve noticed a deluge of what I can only call “privacy demands” that talk the talk… but have the jurisdiction or subject legislation wrong. But AI told them they could demand these things (even if it would be illegal for us to comply! Think KYC stuff.) and they don’t have the skill to criticise the AI or know when to stop.
- maccard 2mo ago
  Yep, and the cost is borne by the receiver of the letter. The person sending shitty LawyerGPT messages will just keep doing it until there’s consequences, but there aren’t any.
- weakened_malloc 2mo ago
  Is it any different to how it was previously? Before the age of AI, companies write all sorts of bullshit stuff into ToS or EULA which was neither enforceable or legal yet they routinely got away with it because Joe Schmoe had no ability to assess their arguments or fight back. The only difference now is that the general population has gained access to low cost legal help and are able to push and argue (whether rightly or wrongly), previously it was the other way around.
  - j-bos 2mo ago
    Problem: the plebs are being opressed Solution: arm the oppressed New problem: civil war
    - weakened_malloc 2mo ago
      So you think that legal skills / help should remain expensive?
      - j-bos 2mo ago
        "So you think {}" in the wild! =D Ty, and to answer your question: No. I'm commenting on a neat parallel. Personally I like the improvements that come from fairer games.
areoform 2mo ago
> Interim relief is a case study of how AI, like a heat-seeking missile, can lock on to the most obscure provisions of the law—and create carnage. The impact on Britain’s employment tribunals (courts that resolve disputes between employers and workers) illustrates a phenomenon emerging everywhere. AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030. > > Free, AI-powered legal advice should be good news for workers. Instead, it is proving to be a tragedy of the commons. For workers with genuine grievances, the surge in demand means longer waits for justice. For employers, it means bigger legal bills to respond to claims, both well-founded or fantastical. In the age of AI, a system intended to provide access to justice suffers from, if anything, too much access. I think this is another case of "we've been getting away with murder for a long time. How dare they use a floodlight?" syndrome. Or, floodlight syndrome for short. There are a lot of laws that exist on the corporate and individual level solely for the purpose of selective enforcement to throw "the book" at the unpopular; the insurgents; or the under-resourced. It's an implicit component of the legal system. For example, a fossil fuel utility, Entergy, stopped an insurgent wind farm / project by arguing that the startup making HVDC lines, Clean Line Energy, couldn't make power lines, because only utilities could make power lines. And to be a utility you need to have power lines. From the paper, https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wordpress-0/wp-content/uploads/sites/278/2020/05/19115829/Zombie-Energy-Laws.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wordpress-0/wp-content/uploads... > Entergy pointed out that only public utilities can build transmission lines in Arkansas, and that Arkansas law defines “public utility” as a company that “own[s] or operat[es] in [Arkansas] equipment or facilities for...transmitting...power to or for the public for compensation.”152 The Arkansas law creates a catch22. Because Clean Line did not own or operate any transmission lines in Arkansas, it was not a public utility. And because it was not a public utility, it was not authorized to build transmission lines. And that's not the only such case, as the saying goes, many such cases, > In 2011, a fossil fuel utility convinced the Arkansas Public Service Commission to deny certification because the wind company had no existing transmission infrastructure, and so did not fit the legal definition of a “utility.” In 2017, the Illinois Supreme Court denied certification for the same reason. The Missouri Public Service Commission claimed that certification was not in the public interest because “harm” to landowners “outweighed any in-state benefits.” Projections for the wind project, however, suggested that it would create over 1,500 jobs and reduce electricity prices for Missourians by over $10 million annually. Then there are such cases at the individual level, quoted text is from - https://manhattan.institute/article/overcriminalizing-america-an-overview-and-model-legislation-for-states https://manhattan.institute/article/overcriminalizing-americ... > In 2016, authorities in Oklahoma prosecuted bartender Colin Grizzle for serving vodkas infused with flavors like bacon and pickles. The practice, though popular with patrons, violated Title 37, Chapter 3, Section 584 of the Oklahoma Code. https://apnews.com/article/business-arrests-oklahoma-city-e286695ead7843a1acdaee7295ef0f20 https://apnews.com/article/business-arrests-oklahoma-city-e2... > In 2012, a Minnesota man, Mitch Faber, was jailed for the crime of not finishing the siding on his own house. https://ourtaxdollarsatwork.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/burnsville-minnesota-man-thrown-in-jail-with-no-bail-and-latter-placed-on-electronic-home-confinement-after-being-unable-to-purchase-proper-siding-for-his-home/ https://ourtaxdollarsatwork.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/burnsvi... > In 2011, North Carolina authorities prosecuted Steven Pruner for selling hot dogs from his food cart outside the Duke University Medical Center without a permit. Pruner was sentenced to 45 days of police custody. https://ncnewsline.com/2014/05/07/time-to-clean-up-the-criminal-code/ https://ncnewsline.com/2014/05/07/time-to-clean-up-the-crimi... Usually, there's been an information asymmetry between ordinary people and the powers that be who know these aspects of law. It's not easy to find such loopholes unless you spend time studying statutes. The parameters are too vague and the laws are usually written in an obtuse way that non-specialists find hard to decode. Enter LLMs. Machines can and will reason over otherwise vague queries and retrieve these laws. And as these laws and regulations are still valid, they can then assist the individual with calling for enforcement / compliance. The Economist assumes that most of these cases are false. I would like to argue an alternative perspective. If these complaints were fake, then surely they would be dismissed? If the petitioners were out of line, then the companies shouldn't have cause to worry. If you assert they're false over a "common sense" standard, then why does the regulation exist? If the regulation itself is vague and wrong, then why have these regulations persisted in both use and letter over time? Why are individuals and upstarts at fault for doing something the government, institutions and large corporations have been doing since the dawn of time? Why dost thou protest, "How dare they shine a floodlight on my crime?"
sscaryterry 2mo ago
This affects so much more than just employment law. There is a steady increase of AI-assisted complaints to UK regulators.
urban_winter 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/mi3zu https://archive.ph/mi3zu
pbhjpbhj 2mo ago
It seems to be an assumption at this point that the massive increase is of frivolous suits/applications. Perhaps it's more a democratisation? Maybe, there were many worthy tribunals before but the prospective claimants weren't able to access legal support? I'd guess it's a bit of both.
prplxd_nihilist 2mo ago
Article with paywall bypassed: https://archive.is/20260810085948/https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/06/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-ai-edition https://archive.is/20260810085948/https://www.economist.com/...
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
epsteingpt 2mo ago
I think AI will be one of the great equalizers in this respect. It was very common at the time of the founding of the USA for the law to be understandable enough for a 'common' person with a couple of years of study and apprenticeship to understand the relevant jurisdictions and case law and resolve their own cases. Now, much of law and academia relies of experts that are inaccessible to most but the wealthy. Should we find the "common person" enabled to assert their rights, you'll find a lot of corporate misbehavior gone. Right now, it's just easier for corporations to misbehave and stand behind an army of corporate lawyers to cover them. Not for much longer...
BorisBinyaminov 2mo ago
[flagged]

146 points by simonpure 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/mi3zu https://archive.ph/mi3zu

Maybe we need a better-scaling legal system that does not take years to resolve simple disputes. I am not convinced AI can replace lawyers, but more people having access to the law without extremely costly fees does sound good to me.

MichaelZuo 2mo ago
I don’t see how that helps? A lawyer isn’t going to sign on to take liability risk unless they spend quite a lot of time analyzing the AI’s outputs for possible blunders? So it structurally can’t cost significantly less.
- throwaway89864 2mo ago
  Lawyers normally don't have any liability risks, no? And reputational risks are very limited, a lawyer can always point to a judge, to the other lawyer, to circumstances, and away from their own (or the AI's output) blunder.
  - MichaelZuo 2mo ago
    Representing anyone in a court room by definition carries liability risks, because the judge can punish the lawyer unilaterally, but not the AI.
  - watwut 2mo ago
    Layer can be disbarred. And judges do not accept "ai did it therefore I, the layer am not responsible for the false claim" as an excuse from layers.
    - throwaway89864 2mo ago
      Realistically a lawyer never gets disbarred. There is no incentive to disbar a lawyer, and a single client usually wouldn't know if a lawyer is consistant in his/her misconduct, judges can't care less and wouldn't go against their friends/buddies, no?
jay_kyburz 2mo ago
The answer is in the article. There needs to be a financial mechanism to deter nuance complaints. A small penalty for lodging a complaint and losing. This fee should help pay for the courts and reimburse and employer for time spent defending itself. (With the judge / magistrate able to wave the fee on compassionate grounds)
- teddyh 2mo ago
  s/nuance/nuisance/
- simonjgreen 2mo ago
  This is a thing, and in the context of the article too. In UK, if an employment tribunal finds you’ve wasted the tribunals time they can and do order costs paid for both the tribunal and other party. Odd they don’t mention it.
  - BrenBarn 2mo ago
    As with most such things, though, what is needed are escalating penalties. If you're a Joe Schmo who files a complaint that turns out to be invalid, no penalty for you. If you're a rich jerk who files a bunch of such complaints, a few million maybe. If you're a giant company that is using the legal system to push people around, $50 billion.
    - simonjgreen 2mo ago
      Again, this is covered, to an extent. Speaking only for England & Wales, the courts have pretty broad costs powers. Especially if one party is bringing litigation unreasonably. There’s no ceiling to it either, it just has to be defensible. It’s also on the court system to leverage procedure correctly to add safeguards against the kind of behaviour you describe. I understand anecdotally the US system is more open to abuse of this nature, but I don’t know the details. This article though was specific to UK.
- tchalla 2mo ago
  In Germany, the losing party pays 3x the court costs. The only issue is that everyone gets paid - the lawyer, the court etc. The only person that doesn’t get paid for their time investment is the person who is suing.
newyankee 2mo ago
With frontier models, I have found so many self contradicting points in Indian tax law that I would rather welcome a good AI helping to reduce discretionary powers of officers via highly subjective interpretations. This power asymmetry is basically the driver for a lot of developing world corruption.
- perching_aix 2mo ago
  I've been thinking about autoformalizing local laws using agents into TLA+ or something, but it's sufficiently past enough my actual skillset that I'm pretty sure I'd just end up wrestling with slop like a pig in the mud. It's a shame though, I consider law to be just kind of a shitty codebase, with natural language being tortured into cooperating, so it's a really natural fit. I'll probably yield to my temptations eventually and proceed anyways. Lord help me from all the creative but completely detached interpretations I'll land on.
  - arionhardison 2mo ago
    I did this for a few federal agencies, here a few examples https://ice.dhs.dev/program/13732-human-trafficking-investigation https://ice.dhs.dev/program/13732-human-trafficking-investig... https://atf.doj.dev/program/44825-open-gun-store-need-ffl https://atf.doj.dev/program/44825-open-gun-store-need-ffl LMK if you want to know more.
    - perching_aix 2mo ago
      I do, though I'm not entirely sure what am I looking at on those links. Could you start by explaining that? They look like training courses or something. I saw a sequence diagram browsing around, seemed to be specific to a sample scenario?
      - arionhardison 2mo ago
        tl;dr a "program" here is a government program (get an FFL, file a discrimination charge, apply for a benefit), codified so that every step has an actor, typed inputs and outputs, and a citation to the provision that authorizes it. Agents then walk each party through it. And note it points the opposite way from ChatGPT-drafts-your-tribunal-claim in TFA: that dynamic broke because AI made filing free while adjudicating stayed expensive, so the queue explodes. Codifying the procedure attacks the other side; what's actually required, where it actually goes, and whether you have it; before it becomes a hearing in 2030. Fair question, and the "training course" read is not an accident; it's the same shape underneath. A program is an ordered chain of modules, each with a declared actor and typed inputs/outputs. Courses are also that. So it renders with the same components. The sequence diagram you found isn't a sample scenario, it's the deal template's actual step graph; the thing an instance runs on. Three authored files per domain: - an ontology: the domain's vocabulary, its regulatory frameworks with real citations, the O*NET occupations that staff it, the systems of record it touches - intents: what a person actually shows up wanting ("open a gun store, need an FFL"), with typed parameters - deal templates, one per intent: ordered pipeline_steps, each with an actor, inputs, outputs, and a policy_check The page you clicked is generated from the last two deterministically. No model in that path. The part that speaks to your TLA+ instinct: I deliberately don't formalize what the law means. I formalize the procedure, and bind each step to the provision that authorizes it. Formalizing semantics is exactly where you get the creative, detached interpretations you're worried about, because every gap gets filled by the model's guess. Formalizing procedure asks the model to transcribe and cite, which is checkable: - every step input is a ref; param:x, step:3.some_output, system:NICS.event; and it has to resolve. A step: ref must name an earlier step's declared output, so the dataflow is a DAG with referential integrity. - every step's policy_check must name a framework declared in the ontology. A step that no provision authorizes fails validation. So most hallucination becomes a build error instead of a plausible sentence. That's the whole trick. Not a smarter model; a narrower artifact. Concretely, since you're right to expect slop: my first pass at four new agencies came back with 100% of step inputs referencing parameters that didn't exist, and prompts that literally said "Subject?". The validator refused all forty programs. That's the mechanism working; I'd have merged them on a read-through. Intents and flows for ATF, if you want to see the layer under the program page: https://wiki.doj.dev/agent/atf https://wiki.doj.dev/agent/atf Limits, since you'll ask. It decides nothing; no adjudication, and consequential steps are human-gated. It's also not a formal method: the invariants are referential integrity and citation binding, not model checking. The genuinely temporal parts are the deadlines, and those do bite; the NLRB's six-month charge window runs from filing and service, with service being the filer's own duty, so a filing-date-only clock computes the wrong date on a deadline that destroys the claim if you miss it. Re: the sibling comment about discretion; that's the actual pitch. Discretion hides in the gap between the written rule and the practiced procedure. Writing the practiced procedure down, with a citation per step, is what makes the gap visible.
majormajor 2mo ago
Moving from an adversarial each-party-has-lawyers-presenting-as-extreme-a-case-as-possibly-can-be-made-for-their-side system to something more like expert arbitrators and independent/court fact-finders would avoid the 'bury them in paperwork and filings' lawyer-cost explosions. Usually the concerns I've seen are around the lines of "the experts are gonna favor the powerful incumbents who they see a lot" buttttt if our system is already doing that AND costing way more anyway, barring entry entirely to many, is that so much worse? Even assuming we can't try to regulate that?
- eddythompson80 2mo ago
  How is that different from the current system? Wouldn’t you just bury those fact-finders in paperwork? Or are you trying to shift the cost and responsibility of the discovery phase to the court instead? Would the court pass it through to the plaintiffs/defendants like the lawyers do or is it just covered by the state?
  - dghlsakjg 2mo ago
    We have quite a few tribunals, ombudspeople, and other non court dispute resolution services in Canada. Typically, the arbitrator is very well versed in the rules/area they are enforcing, and can see right through a snow job. In my province there is a tenancy tribunal that has to make a ruling before a court gets involved, and the courts rarely disagree with a decision made by the arbitrator in the 1% of cases that do get appealed. Because the rules are so clear, you can shovel piles of paperwork at them, and they will ignore it because they know what pieces of paper they actually need to make their decision. It isn't for complex big money cases, but it means that courts have more time for those cases because they aren't dealing with ticky tacky minor disputes over damage deposits and fender benders. Tenancy arbitration is just one of them, BTW. Just about every industry or agency has an outside ombudsperson that is the first step of dispute resolution before a court will be interested.
    - rob74 2mo ago
      Sounds good, but what's to stop the party with more money to appeal the ombudsperson decision if it's not to their liking and then apply the "we have a whole legal department for this" strategy?
inigyou 2mo ago
AI doesn't give you a lawyer service without fees though. It makes you feel like you're getting a lawyer service, then you show up in court and say what the AI tells you to say and lose ten times your net worth because what the AI told you to say was legally nonsense.
- raincole 2mo ago
  The theoretical system can't be "court." I mean it literally can't. If the cost to file legal cases is actually low then there won't be enough judges to handle them.

mwkaufma 2mo ago

Tellingly, the legal tendency The Economist finds alarming involves workers asserting their rights.

keeda 2mo ago
TFA ends on this note though, which seems pro-labor: > But it would present employers with a different problem. If AI fulfils its promise, it could before long give every worker the equivalent of a top-flight lawyer in their pocket, able to file precisely constructed cases against their bosses at will. A deluge of slop claims could give way to a wave of winning ones. Labour said its act would shift power from employers to workers. With AI, power will move faster and further than the politicians imagined.
Gander5739 2mo ago
From the article: "Free, AI-powered legal advice should be good news for workers. Instead, it is proving to be a tragedy of the commons. For workers with genuine grievances, the surge in demand means longer waits for justice. For employers, it means bigger legal bills to respond to claims, both well-founded or fantastical. In the age of AI, a system intended to provide access to justice suffers from, if anything, too much access."
- theptip 2mo ago
  I found this article quite myopic. This is not a “tragedy of the commons”, it’s just a deficit of state capacity. The state needs to use AI to make bureaucracy instantaneous. That’s the only option, unless you ban AI for this kind of thing (not gonna happen).
  - zdragnar 2mo ago
    State capacity is a common good though, and AI makes abusing it much easier.
    - breezybottom 2mo ago

underlipton 2mo ago

I'll read the article once I can get past the paywall, but something important to note in the meantime: "The tragedy of the commons" was debunked years ago: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false... The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.

Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
Isn't Ostrom just saying that with effective regulations informed by local knowledge, it is possible for shared resources to be successfully managed? The "tragedy of the commons" is just what happens in the absence of effective rules governing the use of a resource when individuals are free to act in their own interests.
- KaiserPro 2mo ago
  I grew up near a place that still had a common, the list of bylaws was massive. I think it was >40 and was prominently displayed on the entrance. The thing is, like most commons, the land was maybe not directly owned, but there was a management responsibility. as in it was owned by the crown but was granted for the use of the towns folk so long as Harry Big Cheese to hunt thrice a year at some obscure feast day. the point was, management was there, and enforced. Any common that didn't have effective management would fall foul of its rights and legal action would be taken. Or riots. Common land is owned, but there are group rights.
- underlipton 2mo ago
  That's not a "tragedy of the commons," then. It's a "tragedy of ineffective governance." And governance doesn't have to be top-down.
2mo ago

jmyeet 2mo ago

So I have to wonder if this article written about clogging up employment courts with AI-generated cases is itself generated because the premise (in the title and the article) refers to the "tragedy of the commons", which was debunked almost 20 years ago. For a bit of history, the term was the title of a 1968 essay [1] based in part on ideas that originated earlier. It becamse popular as a driver for privatization of government services in many Western nations based on the (flawed) idea that privatization would increase "efficiency". All it did was transfer wealth from customers with inelastic demand to newly-minted private owners. But it never seemed to match reality. The opposite seemed to be true: private resources became over-exploited whereas shared or public resources were successfully managed and shared by communities across the world in some cases going back centuries. This culminated in Elinor Ostrom [2] winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for officially debunking the idea. Now I understand how ordinary people still quote this debunked idea. It did become popular. But journalists, particularly those for a publication called The Economist, should know better. [1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

TeMPOraL 2mo ago
It's the first time I hear something like this; if that's true, then this must be one major case of meaning shift, because since forever I've known and used and seen used this term to refer to the flaws of privatization. The solution to tragedy of the commons is literally a central authority. It's, like, the opposite of "driver of privatization".
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  Tragedy of the Commons was specifically the idea that cooperation would fail due to selfish competition, so some force was needed to administer it. Economists used it to argue both for privatization and against, but always for top-down, authoritative control. In the US, it was almost always used as an anti-"socialist" argument for privatization, by arguing that the free market would in fact be an analogue for the "natural" competition, because as we all know the Free Market always finds the most equitable and consumer-desired outcome. I'd imagine in Europe it was more common to argue for government management.

sscaryterry 2mo ago

https://archive.is/mi3zu https://archive.is/mi3zu

suoloordi 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/mi3zu https://archive.ph/mi3zu

simonw 2mo ago

> AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030. This is an example of a larger pattern: AI assistance breaks any human system which was designed for a world in which bureaucratic friction keeps volume manageable. Turns out that's a whole lot of human systems.

jackvalentine 2mo ago

Even the “pre-case” legal stuff is out of control. In my Australian organisation we’ve noticed a deluge of what I can only call “privacy demands” that talk the talk… but have the jurisdiction or subject legislation wrong. But AI told them they could demand these things (even if it would be illegal for us to comply! Think KYC stuff.) and they don’t have the skill to criticise the AI or know when to stop.

maccard 2mo ago
Yep, and the cost is borne by the receiver of the letter. The person sending shitty LawyerGPT messages will just keep doing it until there’s consequences, but there aren’t any.
weakened_malloc 2mo ago
Is it any different to how it was previously? Before the age of AI, companies write all sorts of bullshit stuff into ToS or EULA which was neither enforceable or legal yet they routinely got away with it because Joe Schmoe had no ability to assess their arguments or fight back. The only difference now is that the general population has gained access to low cost legal help and are able to push and argue (whether rightly or wrongly), previously it was the other way around.
- j-bos 2mo ago
  Problem: the plebs are being opressed Solution: arm the oppressed New problem: civil war
  - weakened_malloc 2mo ago
    So you think that legal skills / help should remain expensive?
    - j-bos 2mo ago
      "So you think {}" in the wild! =D Ty, and to answer your question: No. I'm commenting on a neat parallel. Personally I like the improvements that come from fairer games.

areoform 2mo ago

> Interim relief is a case study of how AI, like a heat-seeking missile, can lock on to the most obscure provisions of the law—and create carnage. The impact on Britain’s employment tribunals (courts that resolve disputes between employers and workers) illustrates a phenomenon emerging everywhere. AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030. > > Free, AI-powered legal advice should be good news for workers. Instead, it is proving to be a tragedy of the commons. For workers with genuine grievances, the surge in demand means longer waits for justice. For employers, it means bigger legal bills to respond to claims, both well-founded or fantastical. In the age of AI, a system intended to provide access to justice suffers from, if anything, too much access. I think this is another case of "we've been getting away with murder for a long time. How dare they use a floodlight?" syndrome. Or, floodlight syndrome for short. There are a lot of laws that exist on the corporate and individual level solely for the purpose of selective enforcement to throw "the book" at the unpopular; the insurgents; or the under-resourced. It's an implicit component of the legal system. For example, a fossil fuel utility, Entergy, stopped an insurgent wind farm / project by arguing that the startup making HVDC lines, Clean Line Energy, couldn't make power lines, because only utilities could make power lines. And to be a utility you need to have power lines. From the paper, https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wordpress-0/wp-content/uploads/sites/278/2020/05/19115829/Zombie-Energy-Laws.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wordpress-0/wp-content/uploads... > Entergy pointed out that only public utilities can build transmission lines in Arkansas, and that Arkansas law defines “public utility” as a company that “own[s] or operat[es] in [Arkansas] equipment or facilities for...transmitting...power to or for the public for compensation.”152 The Arkansas law creates a catch22. Because Clean Line did not own or operate any transmission lines in Arkansas, it was not a public utility. And because it was not a public utility, it was not authorized to build transmission lines. And that's not the only such case, as the saying goes, many such cases, > In 2011, a fossil fuel utility convinced the Arkansas Public Service Commission to deny certification because the wind company had no existing transmission infrastructure, and so did not fit the legal definition of a “utility.” In 2017, the Illinois Supreme Court denied certification for the same reason. The Missouri Public Service Commission claimed that certification was not in the public interest because “harm” to landowners “outweighed any in-state benefits.” Projections for the wind project, however, suggested that it would create over 1,500 jobs and reduce electricity prices for Missourians by over $10 million annually. Then there are such cases at the individual level, quoted text is from - https://manhattan.institute/article/overcriminalizing-america-an-overview-and-model-legislation-for-states https://manhattan.institute/article/overcriminalizing-americ... > In 2016, authorities in Oklahoma prosecuted bartender Colin Grizzle for serving vodkas infused with flavors like bacon and pickles. The practice, though popular with patrons, violated Title 37, Chapter 3, Section 584 of the Oklahoma Code. https://apnews.com/article/business-arrests-oklahoma-city-e286695ead7843a1acdaee7295ef0f20 https://apnews.com/article/business-arrests-oklahoma-city-e2... > In 2012, a Minnesota man, Mitch Faber, was jailed for the crime of not finishing the siding on his own house. https://ourtaxdollarsatwork.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/burnsville-minnesota-man-thrown-in-jail-with-no-bail-and-latter-placed-on-electronic-home-confinement-after-being-unable-to-purchase-proper-siding-for-his-home/ https://ourtaxdollarsatwork.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/burnsvi... > In 2011, North Carolina authorities prosecuted Steven Pruner for selling hot dogs from his food cart outside the Duke University Medical Center without a permit. Pruner was sentenced to 45 days of police custody. https://ncnewsline.com/2014/05/07/time-to-clean-up-the-criminal-code/ https://ncnewsline.com/2014/05/07/time-to-clean-up-the-crimi... Usually, there's been an information asymmetry between ordinary people and the powers that be who know these aspects of law. It's not easy to find such loopholes unless you spend time studying statutes. The parameters are too vague and the laws are usually written in an obtuse way that non-specialists find hard to decode. Enter LLMs. Machines can and will reason over otherwise vague queries and retrieve these laws. And as these laws and regulations are still valid, they can then assist the individual with calling for enforcement / compliance. The Economist assumes that most of these cases are false. I would like to argue an alternative perspective. If these complaints were fake, then surely they would be dismissed? If the petitioners were out of line, then the companies shouldn't have cause to worry. If you assert they're false over a "common sense" standard, then why does the regulation exist? If the regulation itself is vague and wrong, then why have these regulations persisted in both use and letter over time? Why are individuals and upstarts at fault for doing something the government, institutions and large corporations have been doing since the dawn of time? Why dost thou protest, "How dare they shine a floodlight on my crime?"

sscaryterry 2mo ago

This affects so much more than just employment law. There is a steady increase of AI-assisted complaints to UK regulators.

urban_winter 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/mi3zu https://archive.ph/mi3zu

pbhjpbhj 2mo ago

It seems to be an assumption at this point that the massive increase is of frivolous suits/applications. Perhaps it's more a democratisation? Maybe, there were many worthy tribunals before but the prospective claimants weren't able to access legal support? I'd guess it's a bit of both.

prplxd_nihilist 2mo ago

Article with paywall bypassed: https://archive.is/20260810085948/https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/06/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-ai-edition https://archive.is/20260810085948/https://www.economist.com/...

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

epsteingpt 2mo ago

I think AI will be one of the great equalizers in this respect. It was very common at the time of the founding of the USA for the law to be understandable enough for a 'common' person with a couple of years of study and apprenticeship to understand the relevant jurisdictions and case law and resolve their own cases. Now, much of law and academia relies of experts that are inaccessible to most but the wealthy. Should we find the "common person" enabled to assert their rights, you'll find a lot of corporate misbehavior gone. Right now, it's just easier for corporations to misbehave and stand behind an army of corporate lawyers to cover them. Not for much longer...

BorisBinyaminov 2mo ago

[flagged]