News Tokyo Metropolitan gov't to use ChatGPT from August

The Tokyo Metropolitan government will begin using the AI chatbot ChatGPT for writing texts and carrying out other clerical work in all of its offices from August 2023.

ChatGPT "has the potential to greatly transform the way public administration is conducted," Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said during a metropolitan assembly session. She added that "better city governance" can be achieved by assessing the positive and negative aspects of the AI service. Koike also said the metropolitan government will use ChatGPT for tasks including preparing documents in question-and-answer format, and seek input from its employees about other practical uses for the generative AI tool. [...] To mitigate concerns, such as preventing leaks of confidential information, the metropolitan government has set up a project team to test the efficiency of ChatGPT and create guidelines for its use.

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Last week, Yokosuka began using the chatbot. A one-month trial from April, the first by a local government in Japan, showed it improved work efficiency for tasks such as composing texts. If the use of ChatGPT is continued, the Yokosuka government estimated that working hours could be reduced by at least 10 minutes daily.

thomas said:

Last week, Yokosuka began using the chatbot. A one-month trial from April, the first by a local government in Japan, showed it improved work efficiency for tasks such as composing texts. If the use of ChatGPT is continued, the Yokosuka government estimated that working hours could be reduced by at least 10 minutes daily.

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Ah, yes. Because automation and technological advancements have always been used to lighten the load on workers and improve their work/life balance rather than as an excxuse to squeeze more productivity out of them in the amount of time by adding other tasks or to downsize the labor force to save employers money and increase the profit margin (the latter, admittedly, probably more applicable to the private sector than government jobs like these).

Japan's central government will implement Microsoft's ChatGPT generative AI technology for clerical work and analysis, including crafting draft responses to parliamentary queries. For the system to handle confidential information, Microsoft has recently installed equipment with high processing power that will be used for generative AI at its data centres in Tokyo and Osaka, the first time the technology will be deployed in Asia.

Microsoft will supply GPT-4, the large language model supporting ChatGPT's human-like interaction capability, as well as AI technology developed by Facebook parent company Meta, with which Microsoft also has been cooperating. Japan's new Digital Agency initially plans to spend just over $2 million to use the technology for one year, making it available to other ministries as well. The agency likely will use the system on a trial basis from this fall to prepare minutes, provide draft responses by government officials to parliamentary queries and support the analysis of government statistics. Employees will use the AI's output to streamline tasks. Microsoft also aims to accumulate data and improve the system's accuracy in Japanese, which has been a weak point.

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However, AI must learn a lot of administrative information to serve Japan's government. Moving such information out of Japan for processing at overseas data centres raises security problems, government and ruling party officials said. The domestic data centres also would make it easier for Japanese companies that handle confidential information, such as financial institutions, to adopt AI services. Microsoft will encourage businesses to use the service from its bases in Japan.


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