Council officer in Southampton spent seven hours deciphering AI-generated response

Taxpayers’ money was at risk of being wasted dealing with “nonsense” AI-generated complaints and requests.

Southampton City Council deputy leader Simon Letts said the growing use of AI was starting to impact on officers’ workloads.

The senior Labour councillor said some elected members were also using AI to produce lengthy submissions for officers.

Cllr Letts told the governance committee it was not a good use of taxpayers’ money to get officers to look through long, complex emails which had been written by AI.

He said: “I have heard, colloquially, one officer spent seven hours trying to work out what this particular member wanted from a nine-page AI-generated response and of course that is a gross waste of our officers’ time.

“We have to do some careful thinking here and we’ve seen ourselves some members of the public sending in clearly AI-generated complaints, which go on and on and never get to the point.

“It’s almost impossible to work out precisely what they want and how we can respond to their effective complaint, response or idea.”

The Peartree ward member said the local authority needed to see if it was possible to filter out “some of this nonsense”.

He added: “We can’t expect our officers just to try and make sense of something that Copilot’s come up with just because a member of the public has been too idle to actually spend some time putting down genuinely what the issue is and what we can do to help them with it.

“I say that controversially but we do have to have a careful look at this because I imagine this is starting to affect virtually every area of public life in this country and we need some sort of guidance.”

The issue was raised during a discussion of the council’s information governance performance.

The council received 1,506 Freedom of Information (FOI) and Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) requests in 2025/26.

This was the highest number since 2018/19 and a 15.6 per cent increase on the previous year.

Data protection officer Chris Thornton said officers believed the increase was linked to the use of AI tools.

Mr Thornton said that in one case a person submitted five lengthy FOI requests in a very short period of time and these requests were refused as vexatious.

Committee chairman Dave Shields asked if the council was at risk of spending more resources on managing a process rather than dealing with the issues that are raised.

Mel Creighton, executive director of enabling services, said a data, digital and AI ethics and assurance board had been created, which will look at making sure the council is clear on how it is using AI.

Ms Creighton said: “I think we all in the data and digital world share your concerns because with the best will in the world we put controls in place and then it doesn’t take long for somebody to come up with a way to override them again.”

She added: “The board is very much in its infancy as is the world’s response to AI really.”

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