As I posted to another thread last week [1], I have been surprised by the quick rise in awareness and use of ChatGPT in Japan—despite its production of Japanese

As I posted to another thread last week [1], I have been surprised by the quick rise in awareness and use of ChatGPT in Japan—despite its production of Japanese being not quite as good as that of English [2, 3]. Although I have seen discussions of AI safety and alignment issues in the Japanese press, those concerns seem less dominant than in discussions in English outside Japan. There also seems to be less focus on the possibility of people losing their jobs to AI. One reason may be the employment situation in Japan. For both legal and cultural reasons, it is difficult for companies here to lay off full-time employees. If advances in technology render some employees redundant, companies will try to retrain or reassign them rather than letting them go. (Freelancers are not protected, though, and I know some translators and illustrators worried about losing work to generative AI.) Also, there is currently a labor shortage here, partly for demographic reasons, and a lot of white-collar workers are perceived as not being as productive as they could be. Generative AI may be seen as a way to make the existing human workforce more productive. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36078823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36078823 [2] Yesterday, as a test, I had GPT-4 compose some business e-mails in both Japanese and English based on bullet points I provided to it in the respective languages. The English e-mails were, to my eye, perfect, while the Japanese ones sounded a bit awkward in places. [3] I live in Japan and read and speak both Japanese and English.