The mysterious area of AI and FOI
FOI update by Ben Worthy - October 4th 2024
Are Robots FOI-ing?
This Wired Story has a lot to unpack, but claims ‘Election Workers Are Drowning in Records Requests. AI Chatbots Could Make It Worse’ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-chatbots-foia-requests-election-workers/. The Article cites FOIA buddy which can generate FOI requests https://foiabuddy.com/. This piece claims it is ‘Preparing FOIA Officers for the AI Surge’ https://www.everlaw.co.uk/blog/ai-and-law/preparing-foia-officers-for-the-ai-surge/.
Are Robots in government sorting out FOIs?
Just to make things more confusing, AI is helping Governments to process requests and data. See here https://fedscoop.com/how-the-state-department-used-ai-and-machine-learning-to-revolutionize-records-management/
How has FOI been used to find out about AI use?
A good piece on use of FOI to look at the London Underground is using AI to stop fair dodging https://www.wired.com/story/london-underground-ai-surveillance-documents/ with a more extensive look here https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/tfls-ai-tube-station-experiment-is. There’s another really interesting use of FOI to look at AI based police-surveillance. https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/reports/2020/a-force-for-good-police-ai.pdf .
Academic articles on AI and FOI
This piece argues FOI laws don’t work so well with opening up AI systems, Olsen, H. P., Hildebrandt, T. T., Wiesener, C., Larsen, M. S., & Flügge, A. W. A. (2024). The Right to Transparency in Public Governance: Freedom of Information and the Use of Artificial Intelligence by Public Agencies. Digital Government: Research and Practice, 5(1), 1-15. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632753
It argues that “FOI frameworks generally only grant access to existing documents and that access can be denied on the basis of the wide proprietary interests and internal documents exemptions. As a result, we believe that the European dataprotection framework and the proposed EU AI Act — with their far-reaching duties to document the functioning of AI systems — provide much more promising avenues for transparency in AI, including through FOI requests”. Hooray for the EU!
However, this piece argues the opposite, that FOI is essential to opening up AI https://theconversation.com/freedom-of-information-laws-are-key-to-exposing-ai-wrongdoing-the-current-system-isnt-up-to-the-task-221404
This shows how AI can help FOI work better Baron, J. R., Sayed, M. F., & Oard, D. W. (2022). Providing more efficient access to government records: a use case involving application of machine learning to improve FOIA Review for the deliberative process privilege. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), 15(1), 1-19.https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3481045
And this looks at archives and AI Jaillant, L., & Rees, A. (2023). Applying AI to digital archives: trust, collaboration and shared professional ethics. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38(2), 571-585. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/38/2/571/6832097
Do take a look at this book, The Declassification Engine (thanks Suzanne), which used AI to open up US state secrets http://www.history-lab.org/declassificationengine/ and a detailed paper on using AI on 1,000,000 diplomatic cables here http://www.history-lab.org/images/presentations/AI_state_secrets.pdf.