Who Pays

paid staff of an institution: judges, clerks, case workers, librarians, teachers, nurses

• AI agents are flooding public services with new requests Public administration · Public services and administrative ombudsmen Public service agencies and agency staff handling exponentially larger complaint volumes with unchanged budgets, leading to delays and processing backlogs
• AI Faked Citations In More Than 2,000 Cases As Google Pitches Legal Model Courts and tribunals · Judiciary / Courts Judges, court clerks, and opposing counsel who expend time attempting to verify non-existent citations, as well as litigants harmed by ungrounded filings
• AI-generated submissions with fake references flood Australia's parliament inquiry system Public consultation · Parliament of Australia Parliamentary inquiries, lawmakers, and public policy decisions reliant on fabricated evidence
• Patrons flood libraries with requests for AI-hallucinated books from reading lists Libraries and archives · Public and academic libraries Reference librarians whose time is wasted running multi-step verification checks on phantom books, and library communities suffering setbacks in information literacy.
• Rise of Hallucinated Citations in Legal Filings Spawns Verification Tool Industry Courts and tribunals · U.S. Federal and State Courts Judges, clerks, and opposing counsel who must cross-examine citations, along with law firms purchasing secondary verification software
• FWC hit by wave of AI-assisted dismissal claims from Uber drivers Courts and tribunals · Fair Work Commission The Fair Work Commission tribunal through an administrative backlog and case delays

unpaid gatekeepers: peer reviewers, maintainers, moderators, volunteer editors

• AI Is Producing More Software. Why Isn’t It Being Used? Commerce and service · Software marketplaces and code repositories (GitHub, Apple App Store, Google Play Store) Human software reviewers overwhelmed by machine code, and developers/users facing discovery collapse in flooded app stores
• AI conference ICLR is drowning in abstracts, with roughly 50,000 submissions before the deadline Science and publishing · International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) Peer reviewers and academic researchers facing diluted signal and degraded quality standards across the research ecosystem.
• AI manuscript surge floods academic journals and strains peer review Science and publishing · Academic journals and peer-review systems Volunteer academic editors and peer reviewers who must absorb and screen the inflated volume of low-effort manuscripts and referee reports
• AAAI gave every paper an AI review, 22,977 in under a day Science and publishing · AAAI-26 conference reviewers whose judgment is now benchmarked against a model
• Major AI conferences desk-reject papers over LLM-hallucinated citations Science and publishing · Academic computer science conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL) Program chairs, senior area chairs, and reviewers spending hours adjudicating flagged references, plus authors navigating erroneous desk-rejections caused by false positives
• curl ended its bug bounty after AI-written reports drowned the real ones Open source and security · curl bug bounty the maintainers, and legitimate reporters who lose the reward

the people the institution serves: patients, litigants, customers, applicants, readers

• Emergency applications at the social courts more than doubled in a year Courts and tribunals · Lower Saxony social courts every other litigant, whose case waits
• Instagram Imposes Reach Penalties on Unlabeled and Mass-Produced AI Influencers Media and culture · Instagram Instagram users and patients exposed to unverified medical advice and synthetic personas, and genuine creators competing against mass-generated accounts
• More than 20,000 comments from one platform in an air-quality vote Public consultation · South Coast Air Quality Management District residents whose real comments no longer count

applicants and candidates drowned in a flooded pipeline

• Indeed CEO says the job market is stuck in a ‘vicious cycle’ if 1,000 qualified candidates can’t get hired: ‘Something’s wrong’ Hiring and work · Corporate recruiting and job platforms (Indeed, Greenhouse) Legitimate job applicants who spend time applying only to be ignored, and employers unable to distinguish real, qualified candidates from synthetic volume.
• 254 applicants per job: the AI doom loop in hiring Hiring and work · Greenhouse hiring platform candidates who apply once and carefully

authors, musicians, indie developers, small outlets displaced by volume

• AI music generation floods streaming platforms with tens of thousands of daily tracks Media and culture · Music streaming platforms (Deezer, Spotify) Legitimate human musicians competing against massive synthetic catalogs for algorithmic recommendations and stream share.
• AI Click Farms Flood Amazon Kindle Bestseller Rankings Media and culture · Amazon Human independent authors whose discoverability, chart placement, and Kindle Unlimited revenue are displaced by mass-produced AI books

everyone: the record, the commons, trust in a procedure

• One in five ICLR 2026 reviews was fully AI-written Science and publishing · ICLR 2026 peer review authors, and the field's trust in its own review

a group the taxonomy has no row for; the case names it: coworkers and reviewers

• Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone else Workplace · Shopify Coworkers and reviewers who lose hours parsing, verifying, and fixing unvetted AI-generated drafts and code.

gig workers, freelancers, independent researchers paid per task or bounty

• Bug bounty programs eliminate or restrict payouts after low-quality AI reports crush triage Open source and security · Bug bounty programs (Curl, HackerOne, GitHub, TYPO3, Intel) Independent security researchers losing bounty income, maintainers spending triage time on automated noise, and software ecosystems exposed to vulnerabilities that go undiscovered by white-hat researchers

taxpayers and the budgets of courts, agencies, universities

• AI-Assisted Ghost Students and Financial Aid Fraud at California Community Colleges Education · California Community Colleges Public taxpayers funding federal and state financial aid, and college admissions and financial aid staff burdened with fraud verification

students, trainees, juniors who lose the practice that trained them

• Stanford University alters student promotional photo using AI to swap race and appearances Education · Stanford University Students whose likenesses were altered or erased without consent, and the student body whose authentic diversity was synthetically fabricated.