The world’s first AI government official is going about as well as anyone could expect.
Yesterday, the virtual assistant “Diella” made its “inaugural address” to the Albanian parliament. Maybe unsurprisingly, the software — which had been appointed Minister for Public Procurements last week by prime minister Edi Rama — was met with fury by certain officials.
Chaotic video shared by Albanian media group Report TV shows lawmakers from the opposition party throwing bottles and desk clutter at the prime minister and his cabinet members, after previous attempts to block the address failed.
“This marked the end of the first session of the new legislature,” the video caption reads.
In its “speech” — if you can call it that — Diella took aim at opponents who protested the appointment on constitutional grounds.
“Some have called me ‘unconstitutional’ because I am not a human being,” the program chimed. “Let me remind you, the real danger to constitutions has never been the machines but the inhumane decisions of those in power.”
The opposition party, the Democratic Party of Albania (PD), is a conservative organization which holds slightly less sway than the ruling party, the Socialist Party of Albania, a democratic socialist group.
Both camps have grappled with widespread corruption dating back to the implementation of a market economy in the early 1990s. Initially, Rama seemed to float the idea of an AI minister as a tongue-in-cheek threat — as if to draw attention to the urgent task of tackling political corruption, seen as key for Albania’s bid to join the European Union.
But in a dumbfounding move, the prime minister went ahead and appointed Diella to his cabinet after all, bestowing it with complete control over all public contracts. This, Rama asserts, will make government logistics “100 per cent corruption-free,” adding that “every public fund submitted to the tender procedure will be perfectly transparent.”
Not everyone shares his optimism.
“The goal is nothing more than to attract attention. It is impossible to curb corruption with Diella,” PD official and former prime minister Sali Berisha said. The opposition leader, it should be noted, has been mired in a corruption scandal of his own.
“Who will control Diella? Diella is unconstitutional, and the Democratic Party will take the matter to the Constitutional Court,” Berisha continued.
Diella originally began as a text-based virtual assistant to help citizens through the government’s e-Albania portal, an electronic services platform. Its “AI” component was developed by Albania’s National Agency for Information Society, or AKSHI, using a Microsoft language model.
Until now, the program had only facilitated the flow of paperwork and information between government officials and citizens. Whether it’s up to the task of autonomously wrangling public procurements for the country of 3.1 million remains to be seen.
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