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#benefits#more#llms#system#public#government#services#don#llm#systems
Discussion (71 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
A higher fraction of money going into the system is lost to navigating adversarial processes. And probably the occasional person getting in legal trouble for not validating their LLM output before feeding it to a formal process.
For customer-funded things (eg home insurance), this means higher prices for the same in-practice benefits (as distinct from nominal benefits; any gap between nominal and actual benefits will probably end up smaller).
For publicly-funded things (government benefits), this could show as increased budgets for the same result or decreased results on the same budget.
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> 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.
Well, maybe standardization of how employers or doctors or whoever are required to report things to the government.
A competent government, focused on delivering the services that citizens are actually entitled to, not on paying clerks or avoiding career-ending events at all costs, would do most of this digitally. And by digitally, I don't mean "you can fill the form online, maybe with some auto-fill and autocomplete suggestions for addresses", I mean just sending you the transfer if you're eligible, automatically fetching all the info they need to see if that is the case. If there even is a form, that's too much overhead.
Even Estonia (and other tech-forward EU governments) don't do this. Poland is considered pretty good on the digital front, but many digital processes still result in a (digitally-transmitted) form being printed in some obscure processing center and manually processed by a clerk during business hours.
It’s the equivalent of downloading the entire source code of chrome to access a website. are you entitled to do it? Absolutely. Is it a gigantic pain in the ass for the person who has to serve you the 2GB of source code from their git mirror? Yep
Huh, the receivers in this case are the bureaucracy. The senders are the one that has to navigate said bureaucracy.
So, the entire thing is a wash. The systems are complex and confusing, many of them likely by design. Getting an appointment in some of them can take months. Knowing what you actually need can be daunting as quite often there is a byzantine set of requirements that depends on your exact situation and any missed information could take weeks or months to get another visit.
As someone that has worked in a bureaucracy, yes, bureaucrats are themselves victims of bureaucracy. One could even say the primary victims, if you’re going by total exposure time.
In general, I do think this is positive. Companies love putting barriers in front of everything and maybe the AI arms race will result in "fine, you can have a button to cancel" or "fine, we'll approve your medically necessary claim without making you do an appeals dance for our entertainment".
We're seeing how this plays out now in various states that have made their benefits systems nearly impossible to use, which helps them save money by not doling out benefits at all. Having helped some of my elder relatives try to apply for social security payments online makes me very, very concerned about how it's going to look when I'm that age.
The cost of an automated bot that will talk you endlessly in circles until you give up is negligible now.
> various states that have made their benefits systems nearly impossible to use, which helps them save money by not doling out benefits at all
More data centers, less low-end lawyers, probably more pressure on the judicial system.
However, most of us have experienced people wasting our time, sending us AI slop. People need to learn how to use the tools properly and respect other people's time.
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.
Including Voter Roll Purge requests? That’s in the paper as well.
Child protective services has a tip line.
I see the opposite, where LLMs and purchased datasets will make it easier for governments to create additional barriers for taxpayers seeking welfare.
2b. LLMs are empowering bad actors to exploit loopholes and collect benefits they're not entitled to.
The assumption from a lot of commenters seems to be that these are all legitimate claims and appeals, not a gold rush to get money from the government while the getting's good. In the end it will be the good faith actors that suffer - both those relying on these benefits to survive who will have to jump through more hoops to prove it and those funding the system with their taxes.
The political zeitgeist is to always blame the "bad people", the "welfare queens" and the "undeserving" as the problem with the system. But never the complex system that's seemingly designed to benefit things like corporations extracting as much wealth from the system as they can. Or politicians ear marking the money for things they want to do, rather than the people that put the money in the system.
So, yea, your reasoning just really doesn't hit me in the heartstrings at all.
You should worry more about your parents whose benefits are jeopardized by stress to the benefits system.
What “system”? Are you talking about? Social security? How is social security designed to maximize corporate wealth extraction?
If you mean the more nebulous “system” (“the system, man”), or capitalism, etc. then you’re equivocating.
Seems like bureaucracy was added as a subtle way to introduce rate limits, and AI is challenging that mechanism.
some teams get incentives when the total awards go down in a stable, badly run bureaucracy.. this is real
Good luck trying to get your book published.
Or run an open source repo from community contributions.
Well I thought it was self evident. It’s portrayed negatively because it causes a denial of service. You should view this positively if you want worse access to public benefits.
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.
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.
Note: This is a real request
What happens here it a custom program is created, the program has a protocol that shows exactly how the agent navigates the Gov. system and applies for the benefits. Standard modules are applied to actually do the real work of applying, followups etc...
Despite having a lot of professional experience I have not been able to even get a follow-up interview for a job so I am just pouring my efforts into this.
I have been able to help people get housed, apply for benefits, get into shelters and most recently I started working on erpo.law to speed up and reduce the paperwork on all sides for red flag laws.
Lots of the people that have helped me have done so under the table and not at the approval of their agency heads.
Here is a short vid showing a request that locates an existing program, programs can be codified into re-useable units for people w/ common needs or created in real time... Staffed via O*NET roles that hit real providers I minded from other websites.
Video: https://youtu.be/JOjG71i2F5E
Note: This one matters to me a lot because my mom was in and out of mental institutions my whole life and I been committed before so I really like helping that population because I get it more than most do.
Im also doing city agencies NYC, Boston, Miami, LA, and Vegas to start because they all have their own tld so its easier for me to filter out the bs traffic and bots and stuff.
In terms of scaling human effort the HITL for each module/protocol-chain step can be delegated where needed and the program will persist that prefrence etc...
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.
Hackernews wrestles with AI slop vs. public benefits.
"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.
This could be the chance to reverse America out of becoming a welfare state.