AI and Japan as a Safe Space

OpenAI is American. Why is their latest product announcement so Japanese?

It is amazing how much the image of Japan has changed over the last century.

Eighty years back, the US and Japan were bitter enemies locked in an existential military conflict. Forty, aggrieved Americans were smashing imported cars and radios in protest of Japan’s economic might. When I was growing up in the Eighties, American firms did everything they could to play down the connections of their products to Japan. You’d have been hard pressed to realize The Transformers were Japanese, for instance, so thoroughly did Hasbro scrub even the hint of those origins from the toys and cartoon.

Contrast this to the handling of another kind of transformer: the large language models that power generative AI. On Thursday, OpenAI announced the debut of its newest creation, “Sora.” OpenAI’s systems are already woven deeply into the fabric of modern online life; DALL-E generating static images from text propmpts and ChatGPT (which stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”) allowing users to interact with computers through plain English. Now comes Sora, which purports to generate startlingly complex video imagery from simple text prompts.

I say purport, because Sora isn’t publicly available yet. But even if it lives up to the hype, it wasn’t altogether unexpected; numerous companies have been experimenting with text-to-video technology over the last few years. Nor is it particularly shocking that OpenAI might deliver on this front. No, the surprising thing is how much of the imagery OpenAI has chosen to showcase Sora evokes Japan.

Japan is not a big name in AI. A handful of local startups are working very hard to change that, but the nation has yet to really establish a name for itself in the field. Even still, OpenAI chose to give their new system a Japanese name. Sora means “sky” in Japanese. Its creators chose it, they told the New York Times, because it “evokes the idea of limitless creative potential.”

Limitless it may be, but many of the videos OpenAI released to demonstrate the technology are steeped the imagery of one country, and that’s Japan. The Twitter announcement showcases a drone-like shot of a Tokyo street. Other samples included a night scene in Shibuya (linked to at the top of this post), a scene of rooftops speeding by the window of a Japanese commuter train, and a cute character raking stones in a Zen rock garden. The Sora website is topped by a video of origami birds nesting in a tree.

At first glance the videos impress. But similar to the case of the AI kimono I wrote about last year, those who know Japan will find themselves quickly sliding into the uncanny valley of gibberish street signs and snow on the ground in cherry blossom season and all of the other assorted janky weirdness that comes with generative AI. That weirdness isn’t a bug, but a sort of feature. Because this isn’t really Japan dreamed by a machine — it’s Japan dreamed by a machine that’s been trained on foreign fantasies of Japan. (The baked-in Orientalism of American AI is one of many reasons domestic Japanese startups are scrambling to conjure up their own.)

Far more interesting is the question of why OpenAI chose so many Japanese things (or more precisely, Japanese seeming things) to introduce Sora to the world. Sora’s name might evoke limitless creative potential, but you don’t have to be particularly creative to imagine the downsides of being able to generate convincing videos at the push of a button. Artists out of jobs. Fake news. Propaganda. Text-based AI technology is already roiling online spaces with disinformation. The ability to create videos will almost certainly turbocharge the problem. All of this means AI is a fraught topic. Video generation even more so. So it makes perfect sense that OpenAI would try to get ahead of those bad vibes — the only question being how.

Silicon Valley techies have always had a thing for Japan. Atari, video-game pioneer of the Seventies and Eighties, was named for a move in Go. And Steve Jobs made no secret of his love for things Japanese, using a digitized portrayal of a Goyo Hashiguchi print to introduce the Macintosh. (He also attempted to name the iMac the “MacMan” in an homage to Sony’s Walkman, but that’s another story for another time.)

“Made in Japan” was a joke in the immediate postwar era, and then something akin to a threat in the Eighties. Today it is a badge of authenticity, deployed anywhere status needs to be conferred to a quotidian item: Japanese denim, Japanese whiskey, Japanese cleaning magic, Japanese Breakfast (okay, so that last one’s an indie-pop band.)

Japan may not confer any cool factor in the AI sphere, but it possesses undeniable cool factor in the real world. It’s also safe, in all senses of the word. It’s seen as free from crime and societal strife. It isn’t percieved as a threat, or even involved in touchy geopolitical issues. The things many foreigners associate with Japan, from anime to Zen, spark joy. And all of this combines to make Japan one of the, if not THE, most-wanted-to-visit destination in the world. In a world full of entrenched divisiveness and conflict, Japan is the one thing everyone can agree on: humanity’s shared safe space.

So. OpenAI has a problem. They have a technology with the power to transform (there’s that word again) and the power to terrify. They need to reach as many people as possible in as reassuring a way as possible. Enter Japan, with its built-in fun-factor from fluffy cherry blossoms to high-tech Shibuya street scenes, to soften the impact.

Will it work?

The jury is still very much out on that. But there’s no question that OpenAI’s choice of Japanese imagery to showcase its product is a testament to Japan’s soft power. And for that reason alone, I suspect we will be seeing a lot of more of Japan in the AI space. Foreign AI companies will continue to traffic in Japanese-style imagery, because there is such a hunger for it worldwide. And in the future, it is easy to imagine Japanese AI firms using the authenticity of their output to differentiate themselves in what is a hugely competitive marketplace.