ChatGPT has made news since its inception. It’s been used to finish schoolwork, create wedding vows, and even construct stirring speeches for pastors and rabbis. Now, a Japanese city is testing the AI chatbot to determine if it is worth all of the hype.
According to CNN, the city of Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture announced this week that it will launch a one-month trial in which all 4,000 municipal employees will be able to use ChatGPT for administrative tasks. According to a news release, all staff could utilize the AI chatbot to “summarise sentences, check spelling errors and creative 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.
Mr. Samukawa further stated that the city intends to employ the chatbot during its trial for duties such as document summarization and drafting, as well as producing material for marketing and communications.
While Yokosuka is the first city to give ChatGPT a chance, not every municipality has been as friendly. Italy briefly prohibited ChatGPT earlier this month due to data privacy concerns, becoming the first Western government to do so against the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
According to the country’s Data Protection Authority, there is no legal basis to allow “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of ‘training’ the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform”.