We are battling wave of FOI requests created by AI, says information chief

The Information Commissioner has said an influx of freedom of information requests sent using artificial intelligence means they are “battling against machines.”

Giving evidence at a Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee meeting on Thursday, David Hamilton, Scottish Information Commissioner said that artificial intelligence use was “a new challenge” the commissioner had to face.

Responsible for promoting and enforcing Scotland’s freedom of information (FOI) law, the commissioner said that AI is starting to affect workload.

He said: “I just briefly wish to mention about the artificial intelligence, which is causing a problem, if you don’t mind that, that is a that is a new challenge.”

He continued: “We are seeing across the public sector, more and more use of this. And if you now ask a question of say Co-pilot or Chat GPT about an authority and it doesn’t have the public available data it says, ‘do you want me to write an FOI?’ That FOI goes in, it comes back it says, you’ve got a response from this organisation, do you want a review?”

Mr Hamilton said the AI could then request a review and also send the FOI onto the commissioner without any human properly reading or responding to the request.

He said: “We are now literally battling against machines on this and we do not have tools that can do that.”

Mr Hamilton gave evidence to the committee about the commissions workload rising, leading to delays in responses on FOIs and reviews.

While he said much of the constraints are down to resource and funding, AI is a “real challenge for us and again it adds to the volume here, its going through the roof on this”.

He said the team has started to recognise when a request may have been written by AI which can make a case invalid.

He said: “Every case we’ve got to look at individually, and we are looking at these and I think when you start seeing the tell tale signs of it, immediately you start assessing it more tightly for some of these questions. We do have the tools (for) frivolous and vexatious and indeed invalid.

“In one occasion we asked somebody to give rationale for their objections: ‘I’m not doing that, I’ve got 60 cases in with you I’m not giving you that.’ So, well, that case is invalid.”

Mr Hamilton said he believes that the issue could be resolved if public authorities published information openly.

He said: “But if we could get the public authorities to publish the stuff openly in the first place then the AI would find it.”