> A sacked ALDI employee condemned by the Fair Work Commission for using "plain wrong" artificial intelligence (AI) advice in his failed bid to reverse his dismissal says he now plans to use "two or three" different AI agents to help him appeal against the decision.
> Sadnan Khan was ordered to pay $1,230 towards the supermarket giant's legal fees after a landmark Fair Work Commission decision found he used AI as a "quasi-legal advisor" to challenge his dismissal, despite repeat warnings his case had "no substantial prospects of success".
> "I have taken the very rare step of ordering him to pay some of the employer's legal costs, because his unreasonable conduct caused his former employer to incur those costs unnecessarily," Fair Work Commission deputy president Michael Easton said in the tribunal's decision last week.
The article is balanced; it also cites the case of a computer science lecturer at Macquarie University who successfully challenged the university's treatment of him using AI. (Over the past decade or so, Mac Uni has become very attached to the idea that minimum wage is enough for academic staff.)
So it's the same story as we've been hearing for more than a year now: LLMs are only useful if you ignore all the fluff where they tell you how great everything is, and know how to extract and interpret the parts where they say something of substance, and actually do the work of determining whether the thing is bullshitting you.
> Two days after Mr Khan filed his claim, Fair Work Commission staff sent Mr Khan an email advising that the Commission may not have the power to deal with his case because he had not worked for the minimum employment period. [...]
> In the morning of Friday 31 July 2026 I took the time to write to Mr Khan and explain to him in plain English why his case was unlikely to succeed. Mr Khan was encouraged to discontinue his application, and advised that there could be costs consequences if he did not discontinue his claim. [...]
> Khan sent a reply email that same morning. Mr Khan’s AI generated email once again addressed the wrong end date and repeated the same irrelevant AI-generated arguments. Mr Khan’s email did not engage, at all, with the matters raised in the earlier email from the Commission
I don't see them doing that. From the article summary:
> From October 20, applicants to the Fair Work Commission will need to disclose AI use, while a template to help AI-dependent litigants has been implemented.
That sounds very fair to me. I wouldn't categorize that as disruption to other people's cases.
> Research commissioned by the workplace umpire shows its cases have recently grown by 40 per cent, in part due to litigants using AI.
A recent thought I had about the AI rollout: it’s such a massively unbalanced bet. We are experiencing right now the negative aspects of AI, we are paying for that. For a chance that maybe some hypothetical, sci-fi-like technology exists in the future. So we know we will always suffer the losing end of the bet, and we have no idea if we will win, or even how that would look like to win.
In this example we see how the commission is under stress, something we see across the board, and the benefits so far have been that software and emails are written faster, and maybe something more will come at some point in the future (that we also know will have its own set of externalities).
It’s insane that such a small group can decide to play that gamble for the rest of society, worldwide
The way I see it, LLMs are a direct attack on friction designed into human processes.
- Filing a lawsuit
- Applying to a university
- Tailoring a cover-letter for a job application
- Writing to a local government body to complain about street lighting
- Writing a homework essay as part of a class at school
Things like this have always, supposedly, been available to everyone - but preparing those documents and jumping through the necessary hoops has been hard enough that the flow of applications has stayed at a manageable level.
LLMs destroy that balance. The volume of applications goes through the roof. Now we have to redesign all of these decades- or centuries- old human processes, without any warning that we would have to do so.
It’s not just the volume, but also the quality of that increased volume, I don’t have the data but would bet it’s actually very time consuming to review that 40% increase (because the content will look plausible and confident but will likely have mistake). I cannot imagine being the poor folks having to process all that
We recently recruited two developers. Our recruitment process involves asking three questions before the interview stage. Almost every single answer was written by AI - they all followed the same format and presented the answer in the same way, customised to the applicant.
It was mind-numbing. The non-ai applicants were obvious and really stood out as the best answers.
This, after decades of phone trees, mail-in rebates, specialist pre-approvals, and other processes specifically designed to create friction for typical people when interacting with large companies and organizations.
I have no moral judgment here, but it seems like a classic pendulum. Part of the demand for AI is coming because our systems are intentionally friction-filled.
Though that friction is paid in human lifespan, unlike a deposit fee that cannot be recovered if your request is found have merit. Additionally the other side often is not incentivized to minimize the friction.
So ideally these processes would be less wasteful in the first place, it's just unfortunate that this is forced by unilateral action instead of being arrived at cooperatively.
This is an interesting thought, but perhaps AI is an extension of the general case of the internet itself. Among the examples that come to mind:
1. buying/scalping concert/event tickets: in the past it would have been unrealistic to scalp tickets for faraway venues
2. fraud/identity verification: now anyone can apply for an account in your name anywhere as long as they enough personal information about you without a human confirming you are who you say
3. public shaming/harassment: any moment of yours in public now has a non-zero risk of going public throughout the world
4. spread of conspiracy theories/propaganda: now all the village idiots can find each other
Make it easier to make claims against employers and don't reqiure people to pay for a lawyer. AI help is not going away and criminalizing it is nothing more than making sure only rich people get to use AI against others.
Look at how AI can hack other companies and cause harm, but no one gets arrested. One of the reddit founders was forced into suicide over a bogus conviction over distilling jstor and now every AI when wielded by a tech company gets to do the same thing without their CEOs going to jail for 20 years.
Stop supporting things that give all the power to a handful of CEOs.
THEY are rolling it out in a way that WE experience negative aspects of it. And all that for their hope THEY get to become all powerful rulers over us.
It is unbalanced, but you are hiding the unbalance behind "we". Some are rolling it out in a way to cause maximal damage to others now. The "others" are experiencing negative aspects.
Yeah but I think it is worth not hiding in the language. Because otherwise it ends up as the situation where the ones doing it are not blamed and everyone else is.
You see that in politics a lot - the "politicians" in general or the institutions are blamed for acts sone ovewhelmingly mostly one party.
In the long term, it enables bad actors. And back in AI diacussion, those bad actors are really trying to frame themselves as saviors ... from danger they are creating by own hype.
> The tribunal acknowledged AI was improving access to justice for applicants with genuine, meritorious claims "who might otherwise have been deterred".
It's good the tribunal acknowledges we can't all necessarily afford the costs you may incur in those initial discussions with a lawyer. While there are pro-bono lawyers they have to make sure they're taking the cases with the best prospects for success so they don't go out of business themselves.
> "Most community members are aware of this kind of property of AI now where it has a kind of sycophantic tendency … and may in fact encourage people to believe that there are legs in a claim they're making when that may not in fact be the case."
It'll be interesting to see how the AI providers are going to balance the need for models to be engaging enough to keep the tokens flowing but not so engaging they give bad advice to encourage continued conversations.
LegalAid (and other state-based services), actually do not need to make sure they're taking the cases with the best prospects for success. Because they're a state service.
The problem is more one of proximity to a city where they're based, rather than one of cash, or one of being an Australian citizen - the service is only for citizens.
I have a friend who was drugged (date-rape style drug) and convinced to empty his account in an ATM. Woke up in a hospital without any memory of it. Some EU law forces banks to reimburse you when you didn't get the money of your free will - the LLM informed him about it and helped him to fill in all the forms etc and go through the full procedure, which included appealing the bank's negation to the "banco de España". He got his money. I think there are many cases where the LLM can help people that would never have the money to pay lawyers.
The second case mentioned in the article is interesting because no other case about employee choice had gone to merits before.
Thus it might be the first example of AI winning a case that sets some kind of precedent.
At the very least it shows that AI can put together coherent legal arguments even when there are no close precedents or case law it can refer to. This was something a lot of lawyers didn't believe would be possible for AI to do.
> He said he used ChatGPT to "grill" him to prepare for cross-examination at the tribunal hearing, but admitted, "things did not go the way I was expecting."
I would put the success more on the person, than the AI, for that particular case.
It is already the case in many Australian Courts and tribunals E.g. NSW Supremen Court [1] here is another tribunal [2]. Not sure why you would not like the disclosure as to how a document, statement, etc was made when the author was not the individual signing their name and may not represent their words, knowledge, beliefs etc.
I would like everybody to be completely responsible for the words they sign with their own name and present as their own. Regardless of how the words were produced.
You still will be. Disclosure of AI, helps the court know where to put you in the queue, compared to those that have actually understood the laws in hand. A matter of prioritisation, rather than responsibility.
You cannot surrender your legal obligations to an autonomous system, without violating the Commons. You would need to overturn several hundred years of legal precedent first.
> A sacked ALDI employee condemned by the Fair Work Commission for using "plain wrong" artificial intelligence (AI) advice in his failed bid to reverse his dismissal says he now plans to use "two or three" different AI agents to help him appeal against the decision.
> Sadnan Khan was ordered to pay $1,230 towards the supermarket giant's legal fees after a landmark Fair Work Commission decision found he used AI as a "quasi-legal advisor" to challenge his dismissal, despite repeat warnings his case had "no substantial prospects of success".
> "I have taken the very rare step of ordering him to pay some of the employer's legal costs, because his unreasonable conduct caused his former employer to incur those costs unnecessarily," Fair Work Commission deputy president Michael Easton said in the tribunal's decision last week.
The article is balanced; it also cites the case of a computer science lecturer at Macquarie University who successfully challenged the university's treatment of him using AI. (Over the past decade or so, Mac Uni has become very attached to the idea that minimum wage is enough for academic staff.)
So it's the same story as we've been hearing for more than a year now: LLMs are only useful if you ignore all the fluff where they tell you how great everything is, and know how to extract and interpret the parts where they say something of substance, and actually do the work of determining whether the thing is bullshitting you.
I found this formal decision PDF for the Khan case: https://fwcgovau.sharepoint.com/teams/group252c29c/_layouts/...
Key section:
> Two days after Mr Khan filed his claim, Fair Work Commission staff sent Mr Khan an email advising that the Commission may not have the power to deal with his case because he had not worked for the minimum employment period. [...]
> In the morning of Friday 31 July 2026 I took the time to write to Mr Khan and explain to him in plain English why his case was unlikely to succeed. Mr Khan was encouraged to discontinue his application, and advised that there could be costs consequences if he did not discontinue his claim. [...]
> Khan sent a reply email that same morning. Mr Khan’s AI generated email once again addressed the wrong end date and repeated the same irrelevant AI-generated arguments. Mr Khan’s email did not engage, at all, with the matters raised in the earlier email from the Commission
I think I'm beginning to see why Mr. Khan was let go. That's a mind-numbing lack of care put forth there.
But keep in mind, they are citing the dumbest case that doesn't matter as justification to disrupt other people's cases. It's absurd.
I don't see them doing that. From the article summary:
> From October 20, applicants to the Fair Work Commission will need to disclose AI use, while a template to help AI-dependent litigants has been implemented.
That sounds very fair to me. I wouldn't categorize that as disruption to other people's cases.
> Research commissioned by the workplace umpire shows its cases have recently grown by 40 per cent, in part due to litigants using AI.
A recent thought I had about the AI rollout: it’s such a massively unbalanced bet. We are experiencing right now the negative aspects of AI, we are paying for that. For a chance that maybe some hypothetical, sci-fi-like technology exists in the future. So we know we will always suffer the losing end of the bet, and we have no idea if we will win, or even how that would look like to win.
In this example we see how the commission is under stress, something we see across the board, and the benefits so far have been that software and emails are written faster, and maybe something more will come at some point in the future (that we also know will have its own set of externalities).
It’s insane that such a small group can decide to play that gamble for the rest of society, worldwide
The way I see it, LLMs are a direct attack on friction designed into human processes.
- Filing a lawsuit
- Applying to a university
- Tailoring a cover-letter for a job application
- Writing to a local government body to complain about street lighting
- Writing a homework essay as part of a class at school
Things like this have always, supposedly, been available to everyone - but preparing those documents and jumping through the necessary hoops has been hard enough that the flow of applications has stayed at a manageable level.
LLMs destroy that balance. The volume of applications goes through the roof. Now we have to redesign all of these decades- or centuries- old human processes, without any warning that we would have to do so.
It’s not just the volume, but also the quality of that increased volume, I don’t have the data but would bet it’s actually very time consuming to review that 40% increase (because the content will look plausible and confident but will likely have mistake). I cannot imagine being the poor folks having to process all that
We recently recruited two developers. Our recruitment process involves asking three questions before the interview stage. Almost every single answer was written by AI - they all followed the same format and presented the answer in the same way, customised to the applicant.
It was mind-numbing. The non-ai applicants were obvious and really stood out as the best answers.
This, after decades of phone trees, mail-in rebates, specialist pre-approvals, and other processes specifically designed to create friction for typical people when interacting with large companies and organizations.
I have no moral judgment here, but it seems like a classic pendulum. Part of the demand for AI is coming because our systems are intentionally friction-filled.
Though that friction is paid in human lifespan, unlike a deposit fee that cannot be recovered if your request is found have merit. Additionally the other side often is not incentivized to minimize the friction. So ideally these processes would be less wasteful in the first place, it's just unfortunate that this is forced by unilateral action instead of being arrived at cooperatively.
This is an interesting thought, but perhaps AI is an extension of the general case of the internet itself. Among the examples that come to mind:
1. buying/scalping concert/event tickets: in the past it would have been unrealistic to scalp tickets for faraway venues
2. fraud/identity verification: now anyone can apply for an account in your name anywhere as long as they enough personal information about you without a human confirming you are who you say
3. public shaming/harassment: any moment of yours in public now has a non-zero risk of going public throughout the world
4. spread of conspiracy theories/propaganda: now all the village idiots can find each other
Make it easier to make claims against employers and don't reqiure people to pay for a lawyer. AI help is not going away and criminalizing it is nothing more than making sure only rich people get to use AI against others.
Look at how AI can hack other companies and cause harm, but no one gets arrested. One of the reddit founders was forced into suicide over a bogus conviction over distilling jstor and now every AI when wielded by a tech company gets to do the same thing without their CEOs going to jail for 20 years.
Stop supporting things that give all the power to a handful of CEOs.
THEY are rolling it out in a way that WE experience negative aspects of it. And all that for their hope THEY get to become all powerful rulers over us.
It is unbalanced, but you are hiding the unbalance behind "we". Some are rolling it out in a way to cause maximal damage to others now. The "others" are experiencing negative aspects.
Sure, I consider that implied in any AI discussion, we all know people at the top are (mostly) insulated from negative consequences
Yeah but I think it is worth not hiding in the language. Because otherwise it ends up as the situation where the ones doing it are not blamed and everyone else is.
You see that in politics a lot - the "politicians" in general or the institutions are blamed for acts sone ovewhelmingly mostly one party.
In the long term, it enables bad actors. And back in AI diacussion, those bad actors are really trying to frame themselves as saviors ... from danger they are creating by own hype.
> The tribunal acknowledged AI was improving access to justice for applicants with genuine, meritorious claims "who might otherwise have been deterred".
It's good the tribunal acknowledges we can't all necessarily afford the costs you may incur in those initial discussions with a lawyer. While there are pro-bono lawyers they have to make sure they're taking the cases with the best prospects for success so they don't go out of business themselves.
> "Most community members are aware of this kind of property of AI now where it has a kind of sycophantic tendency … and may in fact encourage people to believe that there are legs in a claim they're making when that may not in fact be the case."
It'll be interesting to see how the AI providers are going to balance the need for models to be engaging enough to keep the tokens flowing but not so engaging they give bad advice to encourage continued conversations.
LegalAid (and other state-based services), actually do not need to make sure they're taking the cases with the best prospects for success. Because they're a state service.
The problem is more one of proximity to a city where they're based, rather than one of cash, or one of being an Australian citizen - the service is only for citizens.
I have a friend who was drugged (date-rape style drug) and convinced to empty his account in an ATM. Woke up in a hospital without any memory of it. Some EU law forces banks to reimburse you when you didn't get the money of your free will - the LLM informed him about it and helped him to fill in all the forms etc and go through the full procedure, which included appealing the bank's negation to the "banco de España". He got his money. I think there are many cases where the LLM can help people that would never have the money to pay lawyers.
The second case mentioned in the article is interesting because no other case about employee choice had gone to merits before.
Thus it might be the first example of AI winning a case that sets some kind of precedent.
At the very least it shows that AI can put together coherent legal arguments even when there are no close precedents or case law it can refer to. This was something a lot of lawyers didn't believe would be possible for AI to do.
> He said he used ChatGPT to "grill" him to prepare for cross-examination at the tribunal hearing, but admitted, "things did not go the way I was expecting."
I would put the success more on the person, than the AI, for that particular case.
> applicants to the Fair Work Commission will need to disclose AI use
I really don't like where this is going.
It is already the case in many Australian Courts and tribunals E.g. NSW Supremen Court [1] here is another tribunal [2]. Not sure why you would not like the disclosure as to how a document, statement, etc was made when the author was not the individual signing their name and may not represent their words, knowledge, beliefs etc.
[1] https://supremecourt.nsw.gov.au/documents/Practice-and-Proce... [2] https://www.pi.nsw.gov.au/resources/procedural-directions/pr...
I would like everybody to be completely responsible for the words they sign with their own name and present as their own. Regardless of how the words were produced.
You still will be. Disclosure of AI, helps the court know where to put you in the queue, compared to those that have actually understood the laws in hand. A matter of prioritisation, rather than responsibility.
You cannot surrender your legal obligations to an autonomous system, without violating the Commons. You would need to overturn several hundred years of legal precedent first.
>You cannot surrender your legal obligations to an autonomous system
Ha ha. What is the legal system but autonomous, for those without the money to access it fairly?