How public records requests could help ‘fight AI with AI’

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — Receiving and responding to public records requests is a major task for states and localities, but it has gotten even more complex and time-consuming in recent years.

Governments receive thousands of requests a year, and that number is only set to increase as artificial intelligence supplies automated and repeated requests. Meanwhile, the constraints on staff time, including on attorney’s offices, mean the discovery and redaction processes during and at the end of requests take longer, as they trawl through communications and remove any personally identifiable information and other sensitive records.

But experts suggested AI does not just have to bog down efforts to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and similar state and local laws. Instead, it could help process requests, find relevant documents and take a first go at redaction before humans come in to verify its work.

“We need to fight AI with AI a little bit,” said Erica Olsen, co-founder and CEO of government AI platform Madison AI, during the International City/County Management Association’s Local Government Reimagined Conference in Orlando, Florida, last week. In an interview on the sidelines of the conference, she said public records requests remain the “biggest administrative headache for any agency,” in part due to a reluctance to use tech to help reduce the burden.

An effort to use AI for FOIA requests is already somewhat underway at the federal level. Last year, the National Archives and Records Administration found in a report that almost 20% of agencies who responded to the survey said they use the technology or machine learning in processing requests.

But NARA warned that it will not be as simple as letting technology handle the entire FOIA process.

“AI and machine learning have the potential to aid in FOIA processing but are not a substitute for a FOIA professional’s judgment on application of exemptions and foreseeable harm,” the report says. “It is important that agencies explore the use of AI and/or machine learning options to help improve FOIA processing response times.”

One of the biggest obstacles to timely responses to public records requests is the need to manually review records, something that has become more challenging as the definition of a public record has become broader . Now, governments are not just required to produce emails when asked for records, but also other communications like instant messages.

“The opportunity is absolutely to rethink that whole process and instead of engaging the [government’s] technology services team, fetch [records] through a specifically written AI assistant that fetches all the data, the records, emails, evaluating those records [like] a human is doing,” Olsen said in an interview at the ICMA conference. “But AI can do an initial review of that. It can also do an initial review of what needs to be redacted. And then the human in the loop and the district attorney can do the final review.”

AI can also help refine and validate public records requests, especially if they are too broad or need more information. The technology already helps validate information from the public in areas like professional licensing and has helped speed up that process by checking paperwork and asking for more when needed. A similar initiative could help check and modify FOIA requests.

“Most often, those processes fail at some point because the information that was provided by the resident was incorrect, invalid, or somebody did not qualify,” Luke Norris, vice president for platform strategy and transformation at software company Granicus, said during a session at the ICMA conference. “So now AI can actually help us do that. We're effectively using our staff’s time, and they're not reviewing applications that simply would not be compliant, but instead are actually helping that resident fulfill and create and do that work the first time in the right way.”

Some governments have tried to help ease the burden by suggesting governments raise the costs associated with FOIA requests in a bid to reduce their number. Legislation in California would make the fees associated with requests in the state higher, in an effort to discourage nuisance filers. But experts said there must be another way to make it easier on staff.

“One choice is a charge, that's a choice,” Olsen said. “Or the other choice is to figure out how to use tools to meet the service demand from the community without hiring more staff or charging the community. It's either creating equitable access to information, or not.”

In time, AI could totally transform the public records process and make it something close to self-service with requests fulfilled in a matter of hours or days rather than weeks, months or years, Olsen said. But, she added, there is a long road ahead.

“If we really think about where this could go, that is sort of the Holy Grail of a fully transparent government,” Olsen said. “Some folks are quite scared of that. Clearly, we’ve got a way to go. The data is not ready for that yet. But if we think about the big bold vision, that would be the big bold vision, that any city would have their AI solution such that a citizen can ask for anything they needed, information wise.”