NiemanLab: “Erlend Ofte Arntsen has filed more Freedom of Information Act requests than he can count — triple digits by one tally, quadruple when you include follow-ups and related requests. Now, a new newsroom assistant at one of Norway’s largest newspapers is transforming Arntsen’s workflow, saving time that could be better spent on shoe-leather reporting than arguing in legalese with government bureaucrats. That assistant is called FOIA Bot and is powered by generative AI. When the government sends back a request or rejection, the bot comes up with a competent rejoinder, given its access to the whole of Norway’s FOIA law and 75 templates of similar responses from the Norwegian Press Association. “It’s something I would have had to use a half a day [for] when I’m back in my investigative unit, where I have time to think those long thoughts,” Arntsen, who works at Verdens Gang, told Nieman Lab. “I was able to get this done on a night shift working breaking news, because I used that bot. FOIA Bot is part of an emerging tech stack of newsroom tools that leverage a specialized AI architecture called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. (Apparently, no one ever asked a chatbot to use its creative writing powers to come up with a catchier name.) It’s the same method that powers search bots like The Financial Times’ Ask FT, which draws on FT content to answer reader queries and has been used by 35,000 readers since its formal launch this April…Summarization is, in fact, the very application newsrooms are embracing the fastest. In addition to The Financial Times, The Washington Post unveiled “Ask the Post AI” last November, and The San Francisco Chronicle rolled out “the Kamala Harris News Assistant,” which pulled from nearly three decades of California political coverage to answer questions about the then-presidential candidate. Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), Germany’s largest wire agency, has taken all of its content from 2018 onward as well as its current newsfeed and built a real-time database that users and staffers alike can query. As the bot generates its summary, each answer comes with a little green number that links to the corresponding DPA article..”