A 4-year-old girl has died in the city of Tsu, Mie Prefecture, after the prefectural government decided not to take her into temporary custody based on an artificial intelligence assessment of the case, it was learned Tuesday.
In June, the Mie Prefectural Police arrested the girl's mother, 42, for allegedly inflicting injuries resulting in the girl's death.
The AI system, which was introduced in 2020, uses data collected from around 13,000 past cases handled by child consultation centers and shows the proportion of previous cases in which children were taken into temporary custody.
According to the prefecture, the system put the custody rate for the recent case at 39%. The prefecture then decided to monitor the situation without taking the girl into temporary custody, partly because the mother indicated that she would follow the guidance of child consultation center staff.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Mie Gov. Katsuyuki Ichimi stressed the importance of decisions made by officials handling such cases. "The figures shown by the AI system are nothing more than a yardstick," he said.
"We can't draw a conclusion now as to whether (the way the AI system was used to make the decision) was 100% appropriate," the governor also said. He noted that a third-party committee of outside experts will review the case.
Also on Tuesday, the Mie Prefectural Government revealed a plan to visually check the safety of all children under home monitoring by child consultation centers.
In the case of the 4-year-old, the child consultation center had not visually confirmed her safety for nearly a year since she stopped attending day care.