Japan to Consider Government Adoption of AI Technology

Japan to consider government adoption of AI Technology as OpenAI CEO is looking to open an office

According to Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, Japan would explore adopting artificial intelligence technologies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot if privacy and cybersecurity issues are fixed.

The senior government spokesperson Matsuno made his comments just before OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida while visiting Japan. Altman said that his business is "looking at creating an office" while in Japan.

In response to a question on Italy's temporary ban on ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed company, Matsuno stated during a press conference that Japan is aware of other nations' activities.

After determining how to address issues like data breaches, Japan will keep considering the use of AI to lessen the workload of government personnel, Matsuno said.

Italy Ban

According to news sources, Italy last week temporarily outlawed the usage of ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, due to privacy concerns.

"The US-based business that is building and running the platform, OpenAI, was immediately temporarily restricted from handling data belonging to Italian consumers by the Italian SA. The official announcement from Italy's data protection body stated that an investigation into the case's facts had also been started.

The action was taken a few days after Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter and founder of OpenAI, and a group of industry leaders called for a six-month moratorium on training systems more potent than OpenAI's recently released model GPT-4 in an open letter to the US Federal Trade Commission.

More than 1,000 people, including Musk, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and AI luminaries Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, signed the letter, which was published by the non-profit Future of Life Institute. The letter called for a halt to advanced AI development until shared safety protocols for such designs were created, put into place, and independently audited.

According to the statement from the Italian authorities, a data breach impacting the discussions of ChatGPT users and data on payments made by service customers was discovered on March 20.