Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

ChatGPT misidentified Japan’s PM, digital minister says

Trevor Mogg
By

OpenAI’s ChatGPT may be pretty smart, but it’s not currently able to correctly identify the person at the helm of the world’s third-biggest economy.

Japan’s digital minister, Taro Kono, said that when he recently tried out OpenAI’s much-lauded chatbot, it mistook him for Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida — the person he lost to in a leadership election in 2021.

Recommended Videos

“I asked ChatGPT who Kono Taro is and he came back with the wrong answer, so you need to be careful,” Kono told Bloomberg, adding that the chatbot responded with: “The prime minister of Japan.”

Related

ChatGPT’s website it points out that the chatbot “may occasionally generate incorrect information.”

Kono was speaking as his administration begins to examine the pros and cons of AI, with the issue of regulation expected to come up during the Group of Seven meeting in Hiroshima later this week.

Japan’s digital minister told Bloomberg that Japan is “more eager to try new AI technologies,” adding that the government is discussing its use with various companies in the sector.

Kono’s comments come a month after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visited Tokyo to discuss business. While his AI tool may have been confused about Kono’s identity, we’re assuming Altman knew who he was speaking to during a meeting with the actual prime minister, Fumio Kishida. Altman revealed during the exchange that OpenAI is considering opening an office in Tokyo “to engage with the wonderful talent and build something great for Japanese people and make the models better.”

In other comments during his first overseas trip since ChatGPT went viral in November, Altman said, “Japan is certainly one of the centers of the world, first with image generation and now with ChatGPT,” claiming that the chatbot has more than a million daily users in the country.

While politicians can sometimes be accused of being out of touch when it comes to tech, Kono seems like a good fit for his role as digital minister, promising to modernize the technology used by government departments while at the same time earning a reputation for his savvy use of social media as a way of connecting with voters. The minister has 2.6 million followers on the platform, nearly four times more than the Japanese prime minister’s account. Kono, who studied in the U.S. in the 1980s, also tweets from an English-language account that has more than 75,000 followers.

Certainly, Kono is better suited to the position of digital minister than Yoshitaka Sakurada was for the post of cyber-security minister, a task he was given in 2018 despite never having used a computer.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
New ‘poisoning’ tool spells trouble for AI text-to-image tech
Profile of head on computer chip artificial intelligence.

Professional artists and photographers annoyed at generative AI firms using their work to train their technology may soon have an effective way to respond that doesn't involve going to the courts.

Generative AI burst onto the scene with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot almost a year ago. The tool is extremely adept at conversing in a very natural, human-like way, but to gain that ability it had to be trained on masses of data scraped from the web.

Read more
Apple may finally beef up Siri with AI smarts next year
The Siri activation animation on an iPhone running iOS 14.

As the world has been taken over by generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Apple has stayed almost entirely out of the game. That could all change soon, though, as a new report claims the company is about to bring its own AI -- dubbed “Apple GPT” -- to a massive range of products and services.

That’s all according to reporter Mark Gurman, who has a strong track record when it comes to Apple leaks and rumors. In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman alleges that “Apple executives were caught off guard by the industry’s sudden AI fever and have been scrambling since late last year to make up for lost time.”

Read more
OpenAI’s new tool can spot fake AI images, but there’s a catch
OpenAI Dall-E 3 alpha test version image.

Images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) have been causing plenty of consternation in recent months, with people understandably worried that they could be used to spread misinformation and deceive the public. Now, ChatGPT maker OpenAI is apparently working on a tool that can detect AI-generated images with 99% accuracy.

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI’s tool is designed to root out user-made pictures created by its own Dall-E 3 image generator. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event, Mira Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI, claimed the tool is “99% reliable.” While the tech is being tested internally, there’s no release date yet.

Read more