Faced with a labor shortage and intrigued by the potential for improving efficiency, one Japanese city made the choice to make use of ChatGPT artificial intelligence bot amongst its employees to see if it was price all of the hype.
The city of Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, began a month-long trial on Thursday, allowing each of its 4,000 city employees to make use of ChatGPT OpenAI for administrative tasks, becoming the primary city within the country to adopt the brand new technology. Japan Times reports.
“With the population decreasing, the variety of employees is restricted. However, there are numerous administrative challenges,” said Takayuki Samukawa, a public relations representative for Yokosuki’s digital management department.
“That’s why our goal is to make use of useful information and communication technologies [Information Communication Technology] tools like ChatGPT to liberate human resources for things that may only be done in a human-to-human format.”
Samukawa said the town plans to make use of ChatGPT through the trial period for tasks corresponding to summarizing and redacting documents and developing copies for marketing and communication purposes, in accordance with the report.
While Yokosuka is the primary city in Japan to offer ChatGPT a shot, the federal government has signaled it’s open to adopting the tool nationwide following a visit by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this month.
Altman met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other officials on April 10 to debate the advantages and risks of the brand new chatbot.
Afterwards, the CEO said he was considering opening an OpenAI office within the country, and Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said that when technology security concerns were resolved, the federal government would work to “use AI to scale back the burden on national government officials.”
