The head of the Fair Work Commission says a surge in AI-generated claims (read: AI slop) is overwhelming the tribunal, pushing its workload to record levels and straining its capacity to deliver timely decisions.

In a speech to the Victorian Bar Association delivered last week, Commission president Justice Adam Hatcher said generative artificial intelligence (read: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, take your pick, really) has become a real distraction for a tribunal that already had a pretty hefty caseload.

“If I had to describe how the FWC has experienced that impact in a few words, I couldn’t do better than refer to the famous Ernest Hemingway quote about how you go bankrupt: ‘Gradually, and then suddenly’.”  

Justice Hatcher shared stats showing how lodgements have jumped sharply. Annual "matters", which sat just above 30,000 until 2023, rose to about 40,000 in 2023-24 and then continued to rise to 44,075 in 2024-25. He says he now expects the Commission to receive between 50,000 and 55,000 matters in 2025-26, with no sign of a slowdown.

Over three years, Justice Hatcher said, the Commission’s total workload will likely have risen by more than 70 per cent.

And almost all of that growth comes from unfair dismissal claims. Specifically, "traditional dismissal" and "general protections" disputes.

It's now at a point where almost 85% of workers dismissed in Australia now contest their dismissal via the FWC. He said the “only reasonable inference” for the swift uptick is the increase is being driven by access to AI tools.

Typically when a tribunal's caseload increases by this order of magnitude, it's to do with some kind of new law that has been passed. Not a new tool that has been democratised so quickly around the world that makes it easy to file a grievance for whatever concerns a complainant may have.

The Justice noticed the sharp uptick, and noticed many of them were coming in with the same style of prose. The style typically generated by a robot and not a lawyer.

He then tested the tools himself. After entering basic facts about a hypothetical dismissal into ChatGPT, it produced a section 365 application, a witness statement with “a substantially-invented story”, and suggested a “realistic scenario” of $15,000 to $40,000 in compensation, all in under 10 minutes.

The Justice added that ChatGPT et. al. gives the cases the "sheen of legal plausibility" rather than a reasonable chance of cuccess.

The rise in caseload means only one thing for the commission, however: it's drowning in a swamp of slop.

Justice Hatcher warned that as a result of the overload, major cases could suffer. These include gender-based undervaluation matters, award reviews covering working from home and part-time employment, and minimum standards for digital platform workers.

Funding pressures compound the strain. The Commission expects its funding through to 2027-28 to be lower in actual dollar terms than in 2024-25.

In response, the Commission will require parties to disclose the use of generative AI in applications, submissions and witness statements. Draft reforms will oblige applicants to confirm they have checked all facts, authorities and quotations generated by AI, and to include hyperlinks to cited case law.

Failure to comply may lead to dismissal of the application or cost orders.