A grievance lands on your desk. Twenty-eight pages. Forty numbered allegations. References to legislation, codes of practice, and case law you’ve never heard of.

Underneath it all: one refused homeworking request from August.

That single refusal has been reframed five different ways: a flexible working breach, indirect sex discrimination, a failure to make reasonable adjustments, discrimination arising from disability, and a breach of trust and confidence.

Then you check the case law. Some of it doesn’t exist.

This is what an AI-generated grievance looks like, and HR is definitely seeing more of them. Here’s what to know and how to respond.

What is an AI-generated grievance?

An AI-generated grievance is a formal complaint that has been drafted, expanded, or restructured using an AI tool such as ChatGPT. The employee’s underlying complaint is often narrow, but the AI tool reframes it across multiple legal routes, adds references to legislation and case law, and produces a document with the tone and structure of professional legally drafting.

The result is often a grievance that looks far more substantial than the issue it’s built on.

Why do AI-generated grievances cause problems?

A few features make these grievances harder to manage than a typical complaint.

Volume creates the illusion of substance. Forty allegations feel more serious than one, even when they describe the same event five times over in different legal language.

The structure isn’t neutral. If you respond point by point to forty allegations, you’ve accepted the employee’s framing and committed your organisation to forty separate positions, on a document you didn’t choose the shape of.

Content may be invented. AI tools can produce confident references to case law and legislation that don’t exist. This is usually a limitation of the tool, not evidence of bad faith on the employee’s part.

Policy hasn’t caught up. There is no legislation and no case law yet that speaks directly to how these grievances should be handled. Most grievance policies are silent on the point.

Delay compounds the problem. Every week without a response gives the employee another opportunity to ask an AI tool what to do next. These tools don’t tend to advise on being patient.

How should invented case law be handled?

In summary, carefully, and without assuming bad faith.

An employee who has cited a case that doesn’t exist hasn’t necessarily lied to you. They’ve likely used a tool that generated a plausible-sounding but fabricated reference, and they may not have checked it. Treating this as deliberate dishonesty is one of the fastest ways to turn a manageable grievance into a claim you didn’t need.

The better approach is to correct the record factually, note that the authority cited could not be verified, and move on to the substance of the complaint.

How should the grievance be reduced to what matters?

Start with two questions. 1) what actually happened, and 2) what does the employee want. Answering those properly, rather than working through the document allegation by allegation, is usually what turns 28 pages into something you can deal with quickly and efficiently.

You are not obliged to mirror a forty-point document with a forty-point reply. Respond to the substance of the complaint, not the structure it arrived in.

What should a grievance policy say about AI-generated complaints?

At a minimum, a policy should address:

• How allegations will be consolidated where they describe the same underlying issue
• How references to legislation or case law will be verified, and what happens if they can’t be confirmed
• Expected timescales for response, given how quickly these grievances can escalate
• That the format or length of a grievance does not change the standard of investigation required
• That invented or inaccurate information will not, on their own, be treated as evidence of misconduct or bad faith

Putting this in place before a grievance like this arrives is considerably easier than deciding it under a 28-page document with a deadline attached.

Are AI-generated grievances here to stay?

AI-generated grievances aren’t a passing trend, and they’re not going away. The organisations that handle them well are the ones that have worked out their approach in advance, they have decided how to reduce the document to what matters, how to respond to invented authorities without accusation, and what their policy needs to say.

Get your grievance policy ready

If your grievance policy hasn’t been reviewed since AI tools became this widely used, now is the time. Get in touch with HRCentral to review your current policy and roll out the updates needed to handle AI-generated grievances with confidence.

Or, if you require assistance unpicking a grievance, generating a response without the additional noise that these submissions can generate, call us, we are very experienced in dealing with these submissions and appeal responses too.

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