Artificial intelligence will test faith in democracy, warns Tokyo

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Democratic governments in the US, UK and Japan will soon face a series of crucial clashes pitting the trust of the general public against the potentially ‘very disruptive’ powers of generative AI, digital minister warned Japanese.

In an interview with the Financial Times ahead of the G7 leaders’ meeting in Hiroshima, Taro Kono warns that the upcoming general elections in Britain and Japan, as well as next year’s US presidential race, could become ripe targets for “malicious elements ” equipped with AI power.

US voters, he says, have experienced disinformation campaigns before during presidential elections, but those have been conducted mostly by humans. “If the same thing can be done by AI, the sheer volume would be huge,” Kono says.

“All governments need to consider how we can maintain people’s trust in democracy. . . all democratic governments now feel the urgency to deal with AI, that’s why, at the G7, it’s on everyone’s mind,” he explains, noting that the topic had been widely discussed during the preparations for the various leadership summits to be held they will hold this year.

Japan’s G7 leadership, Kono says, coincided not only with the release of AI chatbot ChatGPT last November, but also with a sea change in conversations about technology. He suggests that, at the January meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, it was surprising how the term “Web 3.0″—once a favorite point of reference for discussions of disruptive technology—completely faded away.

Instead, he says, everyone was talking about AI because ChatGPT had suddenly created something tangible where, before, the conversation had been more theoretical. People could use ChatGPT, she says, and feel first-hand the power of what AI can do. “You can see what to expect in the future,” she says.

But alongside the big technology questions raised by advances in artificial intelligence, the G7 will also have a series of more immediately practical discussions. Notably, Japan went to great lengths to include a discussion of cross-border data flow, a topic on which the US and Europe are sharply divided in their approach to regulation and where Kono believes Japan has been able to provide a link function.

Democratic governments now feel an urgency to deal with AI. . . at the G7, is on everyone’s mind

While international bodies such as the World Trade Organization and the Financial Stability Board exist to monitor respective policy areas, there is no such body to oversee the global flow of data, despite their now critical importance to the economy modern.

In Davos in 2019, the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proposed the idea of ​​an international order described as Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT), which aimed to reconcile economic and privacy considerations. At this year’s gathering of digital ministers in Gunma, the G7 approved the creation of a non-binding institutional framework, potentially hosted at the OECD, which according to industry groups would serve as a first step towards global data governance.

But the problem that the scheme quickly ran into was the highly fragmented patchwork of regulatory regimes. European legislation, which came into effect in 2018, is at the more difficult end of the regulatory ladder. In contrast, the United States, says Kono, “is the wild, wild west, where anything goes.” Japan, he says, is probably closer to the position of the United States and would instinctively tend to wait for emerging technology to develop some distance before figuring out whether it needed regulation.

“So it’s quite difficult to achieve convergence,” says Kono. “I mean, we won’t have a set of rules related to data transfer globally in a very short time.” However, while it’s important to see how far apart everyone is, he also thinks it’s worth emphasizing the need to increase “interoperability” on the issue.

The final G7 communiqué should include agreement on the principle that while the cross-border flow of data and information is good for productivity and innovation, it raises significant challenges relating to privacy, the protection of intellectual property rights and security.

According to those familiar with the document, the draft statement affirms the intention of the G7 nations to operationalize the DFFT concept, in order to gain more widespread support for the principle and greater convergence between existing regulatory approaches.

Japan’s attempt to take a leadership role on this data flow problem coincides with a time when the country is struggling to secure a reputation on all things digital. Kono—a seasoned former foreign minister and leadership challenger—became Japan’s digital affairs minister in August 2022. He eagerly inherited a blueprint for dragging Japan’s paper bureaucracy into the digital age, but he continued to encounter strong resistance.

The discrepancy between Japan’s economic strength and its digital prowess can be striking. As foreign minister, Kono was accustomed to making offers of assistance to his counterparts around the world.

“I would tell them that if there is anything Japan can do, we are happy to assist you. But since I became minister of digital, it is my counterpart who offers everything he can do to help digitize Japan. Everyone knows we’re late,” she says.