The news that shook Japan this week was the arrest of Shinnosuke Abe, manager of the Nippon Professional Baseball — a franchise in Yomiuri Giants manager Shinnosuke Abe arrested on assault charges and resigned. According to reports, on the evening of May 25, Abe had been drinking at home when a quarrel broke out between his eldest and youngest daughters. He intervened, telling them to keep quiet. His eldest daughter reportedly said something back, at which point Abe assaulted her.
The eldest daughter then turned to Chat GPTGPT for advice. The tool suggested she could consult a child guidance center (a support facility for children established by local governments across Japan; protecting children from parental violence is among its mandated functions). When the eldest daughter contacted the center, police were dispatched and Abe was arrested.
Abe was released in the early hours of May 26. Later that day, he informed club executives of his intention to resign at the Giants offices and held a press conference.
The Giants hold such institutional sway over Japanese baseball that they are often called its ruling power. The arrest and resignation of the team’s manager was an event without precedent, and the shock it sent through the country reflected that.
A Message from Abe’s Eldest Daughter to the Press
At the press conference where Abe announced his resignation, his lawyer read aloud a message from his eldest daughter. An excerpt follows.
“There was no hitting or kicking. Reports have described me as having been struck, but I would like to make clear that those accounts differ from the facts, the result of my own overly dramatic description of what happened. This was the first time my father and I had ever had such a serious fight. When I consulted ChatGPT, it explained that there is something called a child guidance center where one can seek advice anonymously, so I called. I sought the advice of the center’s staff member, saying I didn’t know what to do — but without anyone asking what I actually wanted to happen, the police were contacted.
I was the one most surprised when the police arrived, and as I watched my father being taken away, I broke down in tears right there. I am deeply sorry for causing such a commotion and allowing this to become such a major incident. I sincerely apologize.”
The eldest daughter also wrote that she found it “deeply embarrassing, though it may not be my place to say so, that things escalated to this point.” Given that what had begun as a simple family quarrel ended with her father losing his job and the matter becoming known across the country, one can well understand why she would feel that way.
Pope Leo XIV’s Concerns and the Abe Case
In what was a complete coincidence, on the same May 25 that the incident unfolded in Japan, Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical acknowledging the utility of AI while expressing serious concerns. His worries centered on AI’s potential to exclude certain people from employment and other spheres of life, to erode human creativity and judgment, and to be exploited for political ends.
Considered alongside the Abe case, there is perhaps one more thing we need to keep in mind, beyond the concerns that the Pope has raised: that using AI requires us to take an honest look at our own level of literacy with it.
It is not that Abe’s eldest daughter lacked the ability to use AI. She was 18. To expect someone of that age to think through how a single action on her part might set off a chain of consequences in the wider world — to simulate all of that in her head — would be asking too much.
Having heard directly from the person involved that a guardian had committed an assault, the child guidance center had no choice but to act — and it is worth noting that Japan’s child guidance centers had long been criticized for their passive response to domestic violence. The fact that the incident occurred at night may also have limited the center’s options. It contacted the police, and the police, as they are required to do, conducted a fact-finding investigation. Once the assault was confirmed, they had to arrest Abe and probe the details.
To repeat: asking an 18-year-old to have anticipated this chain of events would be unreasonable. The author does not believe minors should be barred from using AI. But at a minimum, parents with children need to be teaching them that AI can be wrong, and that even when it is correct, it is speaking in generalities that may not apply to their specific situation.
And that goes for adults, too.
