KafkaGPT: On algorithmic bureaucracy and keeping law’s promise

Abstract

While artificial intelligence (AI) offers promise as a tool for efficiency and access to justice, in public administration it also threatens to reproduce the perversity in Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law”: systems that mimic legality while rendering the law opaque and unreachable. I develop the concept of “Digital Kafkaism” to describe this pathology, and argue that a crucial surface of contest lies in the design of human–computer interactions that mediate administrative decisions. Drawing on administrative law’s core values (such as reason-giving, accountability and contestability), I argue that these can be preserved within socio-technical systems if we treat Responsible AI (RAI) not as a matter of stating abstract principles or technical fixes, but as a design brief. Lawyers, I argue, have a distinctive contribution to make in this interdisciplinary project: to ensure that the gateway to the law remains genuinely open by embedding public law commitments in the architectures of digital administration. To this end, I propose a programmatic set of design-facing requirements to translate public-law values into operational constraints for AI-mediated administration.