The developer of ChatGPT said on Monday that his company plans to open an office in Japan amid growing concerns about the chatbot’s unauthorized collection of personal data and the impact on the educational environment.
Sam Altman, chief executive of US-based OpenAI, met with Prime Minister Fumi Kishida in Tokyo as AI risks are expected to be discussed at a Group of Seven ministerial meeting on digital issues to be hosted by Japan in late April.
Altman told reporters that he explained the pros and cons of ChatGPT to Kishida, who will chair the G-7 summit in his constituency of Hiroshima in May, while also saying that the prime minister had expressed an interest in AI technology.
Chatbots are software applications trained using vast amounts of data from the Internet, allowing them to process and simulate human conversations with users.
ChatGPT company plans to open office in Japan
Launched in November 2022 as a prototype, ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer and is powered by a machine learning model that works much like the human brain.
The conversations between Kishida and Altman took place at a time when many countries have tightened regulations on the use of ChatGPT due to suspicions that OpenAI is illegally collecting vast amounts of personal data from its users, harming privacy.
Altman expressed a desire to exchange views with policymakers around the world on AI technology and his firm’s ChatGPT. In Japan, the Ministry of Education has struggled to formulate guidelines for the use of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots in schools, amid growing concerns about their impact on students’ writing and thinking skills.
After meeting with Kishida, Altman said, “We talked about the advantages of this technology and how to mitigate the disadvantages,” expressing hope that AI chatbots will continue to prevail in Japan as their models are better suited to the nation’s language and culture.
On Monday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Japan would explore using chatbot technology to ease the administrative burden on government officials.
However, the top government spokesman added that the move could only be implemented if concerns about handling of confidential information and leaks of personal data were resolved.
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