Excerpt
An information request was made to Simon Court, the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Infrastructure and RMA Reform. The request was for:
"All of Simon Court’s chat logs with generative AI tools, including but not limited to ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, etc.
"This includes the minister’s chat logs on personal or non-official accounts, where they were acting in an official capacity. Signs of acting in an official capacity could include information relating to social media posts, press releases or other public statements, or information relating to the policies or actions of the Government, of public service agencies or of Ministers."
In response, the Under Secretary provided the requester with a summary of the information requested, under section 16(2) of the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA).
The Under Secretary advised the request raised an administrative burden due to the large volume of information potentially within scope. The time commitment needed to find, assess, and extract the information was high. Extraction alone would require extensive manual collation as the full logs were not readily extractable. He advised that due to the nature of the information requested, much of the work would need to be done by himself and limited staffing resources in his office. This would impair the efficient administration of his office given the other responsibilities and work of these people.
The requester made a complaint to Chief Ombudsman John Allen about the decision to release the information by way of a summary. The requester considered there was a high public interest in transparency around the ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to inform and assist policy development.
The full case note can be found in the documents above.