October 10, 2023
TOKYO – Prime Minister Fumio Kishida plans to announce at a U.N.-sponsored conference on Monday that the Group of Seven nations will draw up a code of conduct for developers of generative artificial intelligence as early as this fall, according to a draft of his speech.
Kishida is expected to reveal the plan during a session about AI at the Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto. The forum will discuss a wide range of challenges related to the internet.
The prime minister is also expected to stress the importance of technology to identify content sources to counter misinformation.
According to the draft, the prime minister will announce the plan to formulate international guidelines for AI systems ahead of a video conference among the G7 leaders, which is expected to be held as early as this fall.
As the G7 chair this year, the government is leading the Hiroshima AI Process, a framework for the G7 to discuss how to regulate generative AI. To respond to risks posed by generative AI, the government intends to promptly devise measures for generative AI developers, before international guidelines on the technology, including those for its users, are drawn up.
In the code of conduct, the G7 is expected to instruct AI developers to disclose system functions and risk details to ensure the technology’s transparency. The code is expected to call for developing “digital watermarking” technology, which would allow people to distinguish whether content was generated by AI.
The draft shows that Kishida will stress the need to balance promotion and regulation of generative AI, and say that generative AI poses potential threats to society, such as through elaborate fake visual content and misinformation.
The prime minister will also say that “Developing and promoting technologies to verify and identify the originator of information will effectively promote the spread of reliable information.” The statement is believed to have been written with the Originator Profile (OP) technology in mind. OP works by inserting electronic identifiers into distributed data.
The speech will also reveal the government’s plan to provide aid to boost basic model development and the country’s computational resources, which are the key to data processing systems. The aid will be included in its economic measures to be drawn up in late October.