July 21, 2025
By Heledd Ainsworth
Since the launch of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, there has been an explosion of employee grievances in the UK. Our employment lawyer, Heledd, explores why and what employers need to do about it.
We’ll be covering this topic further in a free upcoming 45-minute webinar: Robots, Rights & Risks: AI and the Future of Employment Law. This webinar forms part of our wider free Autumn webinar series: Employment Law Unpacked. More information here.
On 30 November 2022, ChatGPT was released into the world. This has widely been seen as the launchpad for many other publicly available AI tools coming into our lives.
There are very many consequences of this AI boom. It is already having a profound impact on our lives in lots of ways, including in the workplace. However, one thing that many of us probably weren’t expecting was the effect that the AI boom would have on the number of employee grievances being raised.
Raising a grievance can be a challenging experience for many employees. Whilst some are more confident in doing so, many are put off by the challenge of articulating their concerns in a coherent and cohesive way. Here’s where tools like ChatGPT come in.
Aided by a powerful AI chatbot which is able to turn a short and simple prompt into a thousand-word grievance, more employees than ever before have become potential grievance-raisers. What’s more, AI tools can be prompted to generate particularly complex and tricky-to-deal-with grievance letters.
As employment lawyers these days, it’s become quite common to have employer clients contact us for advice on clearly-AI-written grievances that they’ve received from an employee. Whether a grievance is AI written or not can be relatively easily ascertained by using a free online AI detector (such as Zero GPT or Scribbr). However, the tricky question is what happens next? Do employers still have to deal with AI-generated grievances? Do they approach them differently? Should employers be concerned about the data protection and confidentiality concerns around employees pumping sensitive data into public AI tools?
Here are our top tips:
- An AI-written grievance is still a grievance. We’ve long considered whether we should amend our client’s grievance procedures to say that our clients reserve the right to refuse to deal with a grievance that’s proven to be AI-generated. However, we don’t think that’s the right or legal approach to take. In reality, whether a grievance has been written by a lawyer on behalf of an employee, by a family friend, by extracting bits from google searches, or by using an AI tool, a grievance is still a grievance. The ACAS Code says that employers should investigate and deal with employee grievances, and it is an implied term in every employment contract in the UK that employees should have their grievances heard as part of the employer’s duty of “trust and confidence”. As such, a refusal to deal with a grievance because of the tool that’s been used to write it is a big no-no.
- It’s still worth using an AI detector. There are many free online AI detectors online, which can be used quickly to detect whether a grievance has been AI-generated.
- Amend your grievance procedure. This should say that you have the right to use an AI-detector on any grievances lodged.
- The confidentiality and data protection ticking time bomb. If an employer has used an AI detector and the detector has proven that a grievance is AI-generated, an employer should have some questions for the employee. Many publicly available (free) AI tools, such as ChatGPT, do not have the most robust data policies and therefore, any confidential data that your employee puts into it (for example, for the purposes of writing a grievance) might be used by the tool to ‘train’ itself, i.e. it will use your employee’s data to inform itself about how to answer future questions. This means that your employee’s confidential input could potentially form part of the tool’s output to someone else in future. Just as this is concerning from a confidentiality perspective, it also throws up some pretty serious data protection issues.
- Get an AI at work policy. This should say, amongst other things, that employees should never input confidential or sensitive data into AI tools, and that if they do, you have the right to take disciplinary action.
- Train your managers. With a rise in grievances, it’s never been more important to train and up-skill relevant staff and managers in how to deal with grievances effectively and efficiently. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be possible for employers to take an AI-driven approach to grievance procedures too, because a compliant grievance procedure under the ACAS Code requires employers to carry out investigations and grievance hearings in order to resolve a grievance – so a lot of the process will involve manual/in-person steps.
If you are looking for some advice on the above, or a related topic, get in touch with our employment law experts on 02920 829 100 or via our contact form.
For more details on our Employment Law Unpacked webinar series, covering topics from digital misconduct to neurodiversity, see our events page.
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The explosion of AI-generated grievances: top tips for employers
