Faced with increasingly crippling labor shortages, the Tokyo government is very interested in artificial intelligence technologies and in particular the potential of ChatGPT.
To overcome labor shortages, particularly in administrations, the Japanese government is looking at the potential of artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, to reduce the workload of employees. This is the experiment that the town hall of Yokosuka, an hour by train south of Tokyo, has been carrying out since last week. This city, quite well known in Japan, hosts a large American military base, and many foreign residents.
>> We explain to you how Midjourney, Lensa or ChatGPT work, these artificial intelligence tools sources of technical prowess (and concerns)
Faced with a lack of staff, the town hall announced that it had asked its 4,000 employees to test ChatGPT for at least a month. The idea: to assess the ability of this artificial intelligence technology to reduce the workload in the various departments and offices, both on repetitive tasks and on work that would require a lot of writing time.
According to the town hall, its officials could in particular use it to feed an internal exchange service, a very simplified chat, which its teams already use. They could also ask ChatGPT to summarize certain reports or City Council meetings for elected officials or residents, or to correct official communications. The town hall even hopes that ChatGPT could eventually suggest new ways to solve the city’s problems. Civil servants would thus have more time to manage face-to-face meetings with the inhabitants who need them.
Other elected officials strongly oppose it
There were immediately questions about the protection of the private data of residents or employees. The main fear was that of the risk of leakage on the Internet, from the moment artificial intelligence would have access to all the files. To address these concerns, Yokosuka City Hall says the program will only be used for functions that do not deal with individual files or sensitive data.
>> “ChatGPT becomes an ally”: these teachers are taming artificial intelligence to improve their lessons and help their students
For the moment, the city of Yokosuka remains a pioneer in this area. Some Japanese elected officials are even quite skeptical about the interest or the ethics of this kind of technology, which is, in reality, only an automatic writing system. Indeed, Chat GPT is not trained to think or look for exact information, but only to predict, at a very very high speed, the next word in a requested text.
Last week, the governor of Tottori prefecture, in the west of the country, announced that he was going to ban his officials from using ChatGPT in their work. According to this elected official, the service to the citizens must be done by humans who are in contact with the population. It is up to them to find the appropriate answers. Entrusting this work to a machine would be, according to him, almost anti-democratic.