In Japan, AI helps ministers answer tricky questions from parliamentarians

The Japanese Parliament, called the Diet, devotes hours and hours to questioning the government. This is explained by the fact that most of the laws are proposed by the conservative majority in power, generally the same since the 1950s, with the Liberal Democratic Party at the head of the executive. The opposition, whether from the center or the left, is very weak, and therefore uses these question sessions with the government to exist, and to try to trap the executive.

This creates a tense climate, and senior officials in ministries spend hours trying to concoct responses that will not cause scandal. The questions are normally tabled the day before the sessions, and they spend on average seven hours and 16 minutes on each of them, the time to coordinate between ministries, to search the archives, or to try to make comparisons with the policies of other countries. It's an ordeal. Teams are exhausted, and have less time for real government work.

The Government Digital Agency has therefore just launched an internal application based on AI, genAI, into which it has entered 80 years of parliamentary and governmental archives, all the texts of laws, amendments but also reports of debates in the Diet. It is, in a way, the political memory of power, which civil servants now use to write the responses of their ministers. It only takes them a few minutes, not seven hours like before.

For the moment, only a few voices denounce the use of this new application. Some senior officials fear uniform responses without the political commitment expected of a government. Others point out that AI can make mistakes, that it always has what specialists call hallucinations, these responses that are completely invented but which seem coherent. So, to reassure critics, the Japanese government affirms that AI will only remain a support for the work of advisors, that there will always be human editing and that the minister will, ultimately, be the only one responsible for the relevance of his position.