Trending
State lawmakers, largely Democrats, want to increase Open Meetings Law and FOIL request training requirements for local government officials.
Given the recent altercation in the Chautauqua County records room involving a self-proclaimed First Amendment auditor, the training likely isn't a bad idea. Local public records officials need to be the experts in the room when it comes to releasing records, and too often that isn't the case. But in our opinion the legislature should also help local governments driven to the point of frustration by bot-driven FOIL requests and local governments' struggle to sift through a seemingly never-ending flood of requests while doing their best to meet the deadlines and timelines included in the FOIL law.
While there aren't often physical disagreements over FOIL requests, the rise of artificial intelligence has driven marked increases in FOIL requests across the country that need to be dealt with. In our opinion that solution shouldn't simply be an expansion of government.
Public records officials across the country have seen an increase in AI-driven freedom of information requests. It used to take time to craft a FOIL request, and that fact acted as a limiting factor that helped make the system work for both the public employees handling the information request and for those with a legitimate interest in gaining access to information. The rise of AI has made it easier for those have always used FOIL requests who comb through public information to file requests more quickly, but the use of AI bots has also allowed those who wouldn't take the time to craft a FOIL request to essentially spam public records officials with requests that cast a wide net while looking for any potentially incriminating information. The end result is a bottleneck in public records offices as the number of requests exceeds the ability of humans to process them.
Chautauqua County's solution is to add a position in county government to help process the flood of FOIL requests. Other governments - including some in Pennsylvania - have decided that bot-driven right-to-know requests are essentially anonymous, meaning the governments can deny the request if they have a policy banning anonymous requests. Other governments are trying to use artificial intelligence to help process AI-driven FOIL requests.
AI-fueled FOIL requests aren't going away anytime soon, nor should they. While AI-fueled requests are the public records equivalent of robocalls or spam texts, others are using AI to make doing work that benefits the public easier. Rather than have a piecemeal solution in small local governments throughout the state, how best to handle this influx of requests is a question that should be handled by state policymakers during next year's legislative session.