Japanese city announces one-month trial period for ChatGPT to help run the government amid population decline

With the sudden onset of new AI tools that can be used for a number of online applications, from completing assignments to writing wedding vows. Now, a Japanese city has also begun using the AI chatbot, ChatGPT to see if the tool is worth the hype.

The city of Yokosuka in the Kanagawa Prefecture announced that it will begin a one-month trial allowing each of its 4,000 municipal employees to use ChatGPT for administrative tasks, according to CNN.

According to a news release, all municipal employees would use the AI chatbot to "summerise sentences, check for spelling errors and create ideas".


"With the population decreasing, the number of employees is limited. However, there are many administrative challenges," Takayuki Samukawa, a public relations representative for Yokosuka's digital management department, told The Japan Times.

"So we aim to use useful ICT [Information Communication Technology] tools, like ChatGPT, to free up human resources for things that can only be done in a person-to-person format," Mr Samukawa added.

He also stated that the city plans to use the chatbot for tasks like summarising, drafting documents and developing copies for marketing and communications, during this trial period.

While Japan is opening its arms to ChatGPT, several other governments, including Italy have temporarily blocked ChatGPT over data privacy concerns, and it became the first Western country to take such action against the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

The country's Data Protection Authority said US firm OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, had no legal basis to justify "the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of 'training' the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform".