With FOIA requests at a record-high, government agencies are considering AI to help them with FOIA and other public records requests.

According to NBC News (Some U.S. government agencies are testing out AI to help fulfill public records requests, written by Lewis Kamb and available here), a few federal agencies have started to use sophisticated artificial intelligence tools to help deal with immense caseloads of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, but some transparency advocates warn that the government needs additional safeguards before more widely deploying the technology.

At least three agencies — the State Department, the Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — have tried out or are now testing machine-learning models and algorithms to help search for information in repositories holding billions of government records, federal officials confirmed to NBC News in recent interviews.

FOIA requests can sometimes take months, even years, to fulfill. Last year, federal agencies subject to the law collectively received more than 928,000 FOIA requests — an all-time high.

Officials from multiple agencies also have separately tested an AI prototype called “FOIA Assistant” (from Mitre Corp.) that’s being developed by a federally funded research group as a possible model for dealing with record-high numbers of new requests and growing backlogs of existing ones.

“There is no way for FOIA to work in the future unless you can automate searching of the millions, hundreds of millions, billions of records that these government agencies hold,” said Jason R. Baron, a University of Maryland information studies professor and leading expert on the use of artificial intelligence in government access.  “The problem is simply unsolvable without AI.”

To help train and test the model, Mitre said its developers partnered with FOIA analysts to curate datasets by identifying and annotating portions of records exempt from disclosure because they contain “deliberative language” intended to help officials make decisions.

Baron, former litigation director at the National Archives and Records Administration, said he helped test the prototype by annotating hundreds of Clinton administration policy documents, and found an early version of the technology to be about 70 percent accurate.

“It’s not perfect,” Baron said. “But using this type of AI actually could be of enormous help in the future when agencies routinely are finding tens or hundreds of thousands of potentially responsive records that they otherwise would have to review manually, a process that almost assuredly will take many years.”

Still, some open government and civil rights advocates are already raising concerns that the government’s move toward using AI to help address FOIA problems may create new ones.

Adam Marshall, a senior staff attorney for the nonprofit government watchdog Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said he has high hopes that AI and other technology will help make more information available to the public faster. But first, he said, it’s necessary to understand how the technology “is being trained and used by humans.”

So far, government agencies haven’t widely disclosed to the public what kinds of AI tools are being used, and in what fashion, Marshall said. He added he worries that overburdened FOIA officers introduced to AI may become too reliant on or complacent with machines to make decisions that typically require thoughtful legal analysis.

“There need to be clear standards for the use of this technology and assurances that they’re being followed,” Marshall said. “There also need to be procedures in place for challenging decisions where machine algorithms are used, including when they could be unnecessarily or illegally withholding information.”

Government agencies tend to move slower (make that a LOT slower) in adopting new technologies like AI than organizations in the commercial market. But there certainly is a great need to apply technology to FOIA and other public records requests, given the rise in requests and also the massive repositories to be searched, so I’m glad that government agencies are considering AI to help streamline the process. I’m hoping that they can make significant headway sooner rather than later.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that government agencies are considering AI to help them with FOIA and other public records requests? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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