ChatGPT misidentified Japan’s digital transformation minister amid his push for artificial intelligence-powered solutions to help overcome labor shortages in the country.
“I asked ChatGPT who Kono Taro is and he came back with the wrong answer,” Kono said in an interview with Bloomberg Television broadcast on Monday. “So you need to be careful,” he added. Kono asked that his name be written in the Japanese style, with his family name first.
Kono said ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology, identified him as “prime minister of Japan” when he entered a query about himself.
He often tops media polls on who is the most suitable person to be prime minister, but lost to former Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida in a runoff vote for the leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in 2021,the South China Morning Post reported.
Kishida was elected as Japan’s 100th prime minister on Oct 4, 2021 and was re-elected as the prime minister in a special parliament session on Nov 10 that year.
The recent mistake made by ChatGPT may show a lack of minority language data sets, which is a barrier for training AI software.
Kono said the Japanese government is discussing data set creation with Microsoft Corp and other providers of the technology, Bloomberg reported.
“The minority language data set compared to English is not big, so it could be skewed,” he said.
The Japanese government’s strategy council on artificial intelligence convened for the first time on Thursday, with an eye toward establishing a framework to guide the development of generative AI as soon as next month,Nikkei Asia reported.
Kishida said at the meeting, “AI has the potential to change our economic society positively, but it also has risks, so it’s important to deal with both appropriately,”Nikkei Asia reported.
On April 30, digital and technology ministers from Group of Seven nations called for accelerating discussions on the responsible use and governance of artificial intelligence.
Governance over the technology became one of the main topics at the G7 meeting, as a growing number of tech firms announced that they are developing generative AI products after AI research and development company, OpenAI Inc, launched ChatGPT in November, the Japan Times reported.
SoftBank Group Corp’s mobile unit has announced it is joining a global race to build a version of ChatGPT, Bloomberg reported.
SoftBank Corp set up a new entity in March, choosing about 1,000 people to develop a Japanese-language version of OpenAI’s artificial-intelligence chat technology, Junichi Miyakawa, president and CEO at SoftBank Corp, said on Wednesday.
