ChatGPT misidentified the Prime Minister of Japan

Chat You can be pretty smart, but at the moment you can’t properly identify the person at the helm of the world’s third largest economy.

Minister of Digital Technology of Japan, Taro Konosaid that when he recently tested the widely praised OpenAI chatbot, he mistook it for Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the man he lost to in the 2021 leadership election.

“I asked ChatGPT who Kono Taro was and got the wrong answer, so be careful,” Kono told Bloomberg, adding that the chatbot replied, “Prime Minister of Japan.”

The ChatGPT website notes that the chatbot “can sometimes generate incorrect information.”

Kono spoke as his administration begins to look into the pros and cons of AI, and the issue of regulation is expected to be raised at the G-7 meeting in Hiroshima later this week.

Japan’s digital minister told Bloomberg that Japan is “more interested in testing new AI technologies,” adding that the government is discussing its use with several 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 by Kono’s identity, we assume that Altman knew who he was talking to during his meeting with the real Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. During the exchange, Altman revealed that OpenAI is considering opening an office in Tokyo “to interact with great talent and create something great for the Japanese and improve the models.”

In other comments on his first trip abroad since ChatGPT went viral in November, Altman said “Japan is definitely one of the world’s hubs, first with images and now with ChatGPT”, stating that the chat -bot more than a million daily users. in the country.

While politicians can sometimes be accused of being out of touch when it comes to technology, Kono seems well suited to his role as digital minister, promising to modernize technology used by government departments while also earning his reputation for their skillful use. social networks as a way to connect with voters. The minister has 2.6 million followers on the platform, nearly four times the number of the Japanese prime minister. Kono, who studied in the United States in the 1980s, also tweets from an English-language account that has over 75,000 followers.

Kono is certainly a better fit for the position of minister of digital technology than Yoshitaka Sakurada for the position of minister of cybersecurity, a task he was given in 2018 despite never using a computer.