The Diet spends long hours on question sessions with the government. In principle, questions are submitted the day before. Teams devote an average of seven hours and 16 minutes to each of them, time spent coordinating among ministries, searching the archives or comparing foreign policies. The government’s Digital Agency has put into service the tool, named genAI, into which some 80 years of parliamentary and government archives have been loaded, the entire body of legislation, amendments and the records of Diet debates.
The opposition, of the center or the left, remains weak. It uses these sessions to exist and try to trap the executive. Most laws are proposed by the conservative majority in power, broadly the same since the 1950s, with the Liberal Democratic Party at the head of the executive.
To reassure critics, the government says that AI will remain only a support for the work of advisers, that a human revision will always take place and that the minister will, in the end, be solely responsible for the relevance of his or her position.
This tense climate pushes senior officials to craft answers designed to avoid scandal. Teams are exhausted and have less time for government work proper.
The AI platform is meant to save them time. The idea is also to ease the climate of debate in Parliament.
This political memory of power now serves as a basis for the officials tasked with drafting their ministers’ answers.
Some senior officials nevertheless fear uniform answers, lacking the political engagement expected of a government.
The Japanese government has launched an internal artificial intelligence application intended to speed up the preparation of ministerial answers to parliamentary questions.
Others recall that AI can be wrong and produce hallucinations: invented answers that nonetheless appear coherent.