AI made complaints easier to send. Not easier to answer.

You should not need a lawyer's vocabulary to ask a public body a fair question. That is why AI-assisted correspondence can be useful. The Guardian reports that public bodies are struggling with chatbot-generated correspondence. The problem deserves attention without turning every person who uses a writing tool into a nuisance. The strongest practical distinction comes from the Information Commissioner's Office. Its guidance says using AI does not, by itself, invalidate a freedom-of-information request. It also describes how unnecessary complexity and inaccurate references can create extra work. Those are practitioner reports, not a measured national estimate of AI's contribution to public-sector workloads. A research paper on agentic flooding identifies a similar tension: easier access can increase demand on services that still require human attention. Its exploratory collection is not a representative sample; the authors explicitly warn against prevalence and causal claims. We should not turn an interesting framework into a statistic it cannot support. Our reading is that the scarce resource is not text. It is competent attention. If a legitimate question becomes buried under material that nobody checked, the person asking and the person answering can both lose. But a blanket restriction could also disadvantage someone using AI for language support or confidence. A constructive response would help people state what they need, check supporting references and narrow a request collaboratively where appropriate. Public bodies can also publish frequently requested information and make their processes easier to understand. The goal should be more usable answers, not merely fewer messages. A shorter queue achieved by discouraging valid questions would be the wrong kind of success.