AI Artificial intelligence in Japan: news, updates, comments

I'm starting this thread to create a compendium of news relating to the technology and the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Japan.


The first post concerns the 18 Yokohama City Library collections of approximately 4.09 million books, which will start to employ artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search service that suggests items when users enter a word or sentence -- the first of its kind countrywide. Of these, AI has learned the bibliographic information of some 740,000 books whose contents are registered in Japanese with 50 or more characters. Conventional searches could not reach a book in the library unless the title, author, or keywords matched the bibliographic information. For example, searching for "a book to cheer me up when I am sad" would not have shown any results in the past, but the new service will display books the AI considers relevant. Conventional search results will also come up.

The new system also incorporates a "digital library card" that allows users to borrow books via smartphone and a "web bookshelf" function that displays searched-for and related books as if they were on the bookshelf. Fujitsu Japan Ltd. and Aoyama Gakuin University developed the AI-based service and spent about 800 million yen (roughly $5.47 million) to install and operate a series of systems in municipal libraries. Approximately 11.63 million books were checked out from the libraries in fiscal 2022, and the introduction of the new system is expected to further promote the use of the library.

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Rie Kudan (九段 理江) was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and promptly announced that she used ChatGPT to write about 5 per cent of the winning novel. On Wednesday, the 33-year-old winner of Japan's top prize for literature revealed that she used ChatGPT for her sci-fi novel Tokyo-to Dojo-to (Tokyo Sympathy Tower), which centres around a high-rise prison tower and contains themes surrounding AI. Judges reportedly called Kudan's novel "almost flawless."

Kudan's novel is set in an imagined near future where AI has become integral to daily life. It follows the story of an architect who builds a tower in a Tokyo park designed to offer a place where criminals are rehabilitated. It explores her discomfort with society's tolerance towards those who break the law. Kudan believes that the generative artificial intelligence software has helped her unleash her creative potential, and she said that she wanted to maintain a "good relationship" with the AI. However, not everyone is so keen on the news and this particular creative unleashing, with many labelling this practice morally questionable and wondering whether Kudan deserved the coveted Japanese prize. "So she wrote a book by skilfully using AI... Is that talent? I don't know," wrote one user on X.

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