Diella | Virtual minister – The Hindu

To start off as an assistant and end up as a Minister in the span of nine months is nothing short of a meteoric rise; if only AI could be held to the same standards as humans. For, Albania unveiled earlier this month, Diella, the world’s first AI Minister, that would take care of its public procurement process after having served as a virtual assistant on the government website since January.

The Balkan country, which nurses hopes of joining the EU, has been riddled with corruption. Apart from accusations of being a haven for money laundering and trafficking of drugs and guns by gangs, the government’s tender processes are allegedly plagued by graft — hindrances on the nation’s path towards the EU.

To circumvent these hurdles, Prime Minister Edi Rama launched Diella on September 11. Having come to power for a fourth consecutive term, Mr. Rama says Diella, which translates to ‘sun’ in Albanian, will ensure that public tenders are “100% free of corruption”. Embodying a woman’s persona and dressed in traditional Albanian attire, Diella will be “the first Cabinet member who isn’t physically present, but is virtually created by AI”, Mr. Rama said.

That puts Diella at odds with the country’s Constitution, which mandates that a Minister must be a “mentally competent citizen” above 18 years of age. With Humphrey in the U.K. and Albert in France, digital assistants aiding in bureaucratic work is not new, but vesting decision-making powers in an AI system is unprecedented.

Diella, in its earlier avatar as a virtual assistant, boasts of offering more than 1,000 services and issuing 36,600 digital documents to citizens. As it steps into the Minister’s shoes, the bot possesses the credentials of a novice. That it is based on Large Language Models (LLMs, that power the popular ChatGPT and Gemini), and is developed in association with Microsoft does little to allay concerns, for Mr. Rama’s administration remains tight-lipped about human oversight regarding the Virtual Minister.

Criticisms against the initiative have been twofold — political and ethical. Opposition Democrats have termed it yet another eyewash reform of Mr. Rama. Be it attending international meetings in sneakers, welcoming Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on one knee at an EU meet in capital Tirana, or the ban on TikTok in the country, the 61-year-old Socialist leader has a penchant for hitting the headlines.

Man vs machine

Ethical detractors say merely supplanting humans with a machine is not the solution for corruption. An AI system is only as good as the data it is fed, and the human involvement while inputting this data, based on which Diella makes decisions, is enough to sway the system. Unlike humans, a machine can neither be held responsible nor be expected to take ownership of its decisions in times of crisis. Also, the whole process eliminates any room for deliberations prior to making decisions — a characteristic crucial to a democracy.

Speaking on its behalf, Diella had said at the launch, “The Constitution speaks of institutions at the people’s service. It doesn’t speak of chromosomes, of flesh or blood. It speaks of duties, accountability, transparency, non-discriminatory service. I assure you that I embody such values as strictly as every human colleague, maybe even more.” Countering the constitutional rule, it added: “True, I have no citizenship, but I have no personal ambition or interests either.”

Mr. Rama, for his part, has been committed to AI for a while now. In 2024, Albania employed the technology to translate more than 2.5 lakh EU documents and laws. The country has deployed drones and satellites that use AI to monitor its territory. Mr. Rama has availed the services of Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI that created ChatGPT and a native of Albania, to expedite the country’s EU membership plans.

Regardless, Diella has sparked debates on the role of AI in governance and setting institutional limits to it. As sceptics claim that deploying AI into a broken system is hardly the remedy, for it will only serve to automate the existing problems, only time will tell the end result.