I’m seeing quite a bit of discussion at the moment about the rise in complaints to companies and institutions. Blame is being laid squarely at the door of freely available AI language models.

Apparently it’s putting staff under more stress and draining valuable resources, both of which are possibly true. However let’s also spare a thought for the stress levels of the folk forced to complain in the first place.

I’m not denying that some people love to complain, or are simply bad-faith complainers. However, that’s a tiny minority of the population, so what is really going on here?

For decades, many corporate models have relied on friction as a business strategy. Often described in behavioural economics as engineered “sludge” this is the deliberate introduction of operational hurdles, cognitive overload, or procedural delays designed to influence consumer behaviour in favour of the company. (Think of no-reply emails, or phone queues that maintain they are ‘experiencing unusually high call volumes’ despite this message playing every single day).

I experienced deliberate friction first hand recently when I was caught out at Manchester Airport’s barrierless drop-off zone. After getting confused in the lanes while trying to find my pre-booked parking, I unwittingly crossed through a drop-off zone. On my return, an automated £100 Parking Charge Notice (PCN) arrived via email because I hadn’t settled an online charge within the arbitrary remote payment window. This was despite me already paying nearly £200 for parking with the same airport operator, a fact they could have easily checked before fining me.

In the pre-AI era, I honestly might not have bothered fighting it. Contesting a ticket would mean spending half of Saturday wading through obscure legal jargon, reading forum threads on consumer rights, matching timelines, and then drafting a formal appeal.

The people who design these protocols know this.

Most people would surrender meekly and pay the £100 which is discounted to £60 “if you pay quickly”.

Is losing 25% of your weekend worth £60? You just pay the £60 and you get on with life.

But in the AI era that calculation no longer applies. ChatGPT, Gemini et al. have granted the consumer the opportunity for a retaliatory ‘fk you’.

The sudden surge in consumers challenging these sorts of practices isn’t happening because people suddenly love complaining; it’s happening because AI has caused the cost of complaining to collapse.

AI didn’t change my attitude towards mounting a challenge to authority; it simply gave me back five hours of my life and surfaced the exact rules that used to be hidden behind legal friction.

Parking operators rely on boilerplate legal intimidation that sounds airtight to the average person. AI instantly surfaces niche statutory rules that used to require hours of specialised research—such as the British Parking Association requiring a five-minute consideration period, which protects drivers who merely pass through without parking. I passed through in just 45 seconds.

Instead of losing my weekend reading case law and trying to figure out how to structure a watertight challenge, I had an operator-specific, legally rigorous appeal generated in under a minute.

This tactic isn’t unique to parking operators.

It’s there in the schools counting on parents surrendering to unfair school attendance fines.

It’s there in the public bodies relying on complex appeals to ration services.

It’s there in the housing associations who haven’t fulfilled repairs obligations, but still threaten to fine a tenant for not being at home for an appointment.

What we are witnessing is not a behavioural change on the part of consumers, but arguably a redistribution of power.

AI didn’t teach people to write letters. It taught them where the escalation routes really are. Institutions never won these arguments on merit, they won on the citizen running out of energy before the organisation ran out of process.

None of these systems and practices would survive if everyone contested them. They are all founded on the assumption that most people won’t.

My parking fine was waived. Not because they admitted they were wrong, but as a ‘gesture of goodwill’. I didn’t beat the model, I just escaped on this occasion. The model is entirely intact behind me to punish the next person who makes a mistake.

But the cost collapse of complaining lets individuals win.

The rules haven’t changed. What’s changed is who can use them. The institutions that thought they were protected by their policies are discovering they were protected by nobody being able to get through them.

So has power really shifted? Not really.

What has shifted is a power of a quieter kind — the power to not be argued with. The institutional power to set the terms of engagement, to control the channel, to decide what counts as a proper submission, and to rely on most people never testing any of it. That was never granted, never written down, never justified. It accumulated. And because it was invisible, it got treated as the natural operating condition rather than as an advantage.

AI hasn’t really redistributed power, but it has exposed which parts of it were real in the first place.

The cost of complaining has collapsed within 18 months.

Now the era of weaponising bureaucracy is over; and companies will either learn to treat people fairly by default, or be overwhelmed by the very friction they created.

Photo by Jochen van Wylick on Unsplash