While the government works to overhaul the rules around freedom of information (FOI) requests, Information and Privacy Commissioner Michael Harvey says the system is experiencing an “unexpected surge” in review requests, and he believes it is because people are relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to write up their disputes for them.
“In conversations we’ve had with other client-facing organizations of all sorts across the public body, we’re hearing similar types of stories,” Harvey said in an interview.
And this is just one of several forces currently straining the FOI system, he says, theorizing that increased political polarization and a sense that the system is broken are also leading more people to file complaints. And as the system slows down, it just makes matters worse — the slower the response times get, the more people complain.
Overall, Harvey said the number of requests his office receives has increased by 60 per cent in the past year. So far, his office has raised its file-closure rate, though only by 36 per cent.
“With an increase in files at 60 per cent, that’s obviously not enough,” he said.
Meanwhile, the government is taking some action with a new FOI bill that aims to make it easier for officials to alter response timelines and deny certain types of requests.
Citizens’ Service Minister Diana Gibson introduced the bill on Feb. 26, but it has yet to pass second reading. Gibson says changes are needed as the volume of data captured by FOI requests continues to increase, costing time for government officials and overburdening the system.
Critics, including third-party and Opposition MLAs, transparency advocates, and taxpayers’ rights organizations, have lined up to challenge the bill, arguing it gives government officials too much leeway to reject FOI requests.
Harvey is careful to sidestep much of this debate and maintain his neutrality as an independent officer of the legislature. However, while he is clear that he does not want to signal his support for the bill, he did offer his observations.
Unlike the critics, Harvey doesn’t think the FOI bill will erode the public’s access to information. Nor does he believe it will reduce his ability to provide oversight.
These are the things he says that he is most “wary” about.
The above-mentioned advocates all expressed concern about provisions in the bill to allow officials to reject “unreasonable” requests and those deemed “abusive or malicious.” But Harvey does not think this wording will actually result in a curtailment of access.
“In our assessment, those words do not involve a diminution of our authority or a retraction of the right of access,” he said.
He acknowledges that the new rules could result in more work for his office when people challenge these decisions, although he is not overly concerned that this will be overly impactful.
Getting a handle on the massive surge in complaints that he is already seeing is his real priority.
‘Hockey stick’-like jump in review requests
Harvey says the 60 per cent jump in the number of privacy complaints his office received this past year brought the overall total to roughly 3,900.
Speaking before the legislature’s Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services on April 24, he gave a familiar sports-equipment analogy.
“It’s what, in data visualization terms, you would call a ‘hockey stick,’” he told the committee. “This jump means that the number of files coming into our office has more than doubled over the last five years.”
These files fall into three categories: privacy and access complaints, up 86 per cent, requests for FOI reviews, up 50 per cent, and privacy breach reports, up 28 per cent.
Harvey believes a good deal of this increase is due to AI chatbots urging people to complain to his office when queried about a denied or redacted FOI response. Because the documents provided along with those FOI responses clearly state that the privacy commissioner can be contacted with complaints, Harvey thinks this is a result of AI regurgitating information.
But this is not the only factor. He also believes AI is making it easier for people to write up their complaints, something that used to require time and effort.
“In years past, people would be like, ‘Oh, that seems like a bit of a process, and I don’t know what’s involved with that,’” Harvey said. “But now, with these tools available to people, they’re saying, ‘Well, can you please generate me a complaint?’”
Harvey and his team still aren’t able to quantify this impact, however, and this is still just a theory. He doesn’t have hard evidence, such as tracking data on AI markers. At least, not yet.
“Tracking the number of those that we either know or suspect have been generated by AI is a step that we’re going to consider,” he said.
At the committee hearing, NDP MLA Rohini Arora asked Harvey if he had considered including a message asking people not to use AI to compose complaint requests. He responded that he didn’t want to take away a tool people might need.
Reflecting on this, Harvey says the ideal is to make public bodies more transparent and timely, so people don’t have something to complain about in the first place.
“I think the ultimate solution is to try to get to the root cause,” he said.
The real answer, he said, is a “cultural change” to “transparency by default” so people don’t need to file an FOI request in the first place.