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Comment by p1anecrazy | Hacker News Reader

Nicely summarized by another commentator:

“FOI is for administrative documents to increase transparency in government. Detailed 3D scans a museum does for research or preservation isn't an administrative document.

If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.”

To put it differently, imagine the museum trained a RodinGPT on artworks and other data. The activist now bases his claim to the model on the fact that the model is a document.

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The other commenter didn't answer any of the pertinent questions, namely, on which legal document they based their answer on what a "document" is and isn't. And one of the replies [1] points out to a possibly relevant EU directive against that point.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but saying "FOI is not meant for that" is the type of answer that requires some solid evidence that the other comment didn't provide.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49951807

Re: what "FOI is for": see my previous comment above excerpting from FREEDOM OF INFORMATION IN FRANCE, LAW AND PRACTICE

Re: a hypothetical LLM: French FOI law covers all document formats. The CADA and courts have routinely recognized that documents produced by the government in formats such as audio recordings, x-rays, photographs (of submerged shipwrecks, no less), application source code, and computer algorithms may be considered administrative documents, communicable to the public.

So, if the French government produced an LLM and front end then, yes, that LLM model and its front end would be an administrative document, in principle communicable to the public. To me that does not seem improper or difficult or strange to imagine.

This discussion doesn’t make sense without looking at the actual French law. Just saying that the scans shouldn’t count as a document because it would lead to weird edge cases doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t be applied as written. You can’t just not apply active laws because you don’t like the outcome in a state where people are suppose to trust the law.

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