Everyday Reflections

I’d like to draw your attention to the subject of corruption and technology. What do you think: Are people corrupt or does the origin of corruption lie in institutions? 

Albania has appointed Diella, the world’s first AI-generated minister, to bring transparency in public spending. The appointment is seen as a way to end corruption in government contracts, which is key to Albania’s accession to the EU.

Other countries have also been experimenting with digital assistants for bureaucratic work, including Humphrey in the UK and Albert in France. However, they haven’t had the power to make decisions. 

While artificial intelligence is taking over many roles, it also presents ethical and political dilemmas.

In this case, the LLM is fed with information relevant to run systems in a citizen-friendly manner. But, there’s a possibility of bias/error in the data, it may misunderstand information, or certain loopholes could be exploited. This would affect decision-making and the LLM may be manipulated to represent interests of a few. 

It’s crucial to know what kind of material is being used to train the AI, who controls it and will bear responsibility for any error. Case in point, Deloitte will be partially refunding the Australian government for a report made using Gen AI which contained significant errors. So far, the Albanian government hasn’t spoken about oversight or addressed risks of manipulation. 

There’s an assumption that since Diella doesn’t have personal interest or ambition, she can better serve the interests of the country, which isn’t always true. 

Diella was launched as a virtual assistant in January, and has helped issue 36,600 digital documents and provided 1,000 services through the platform so far, as per official figures. While this is significant, a minister’s role requires vision and acting as a changemaker, and mere process automation is not enough to judge Diella’s calibre. 

It’s also unclear what role citizens will play and whether they can give inputs regarding the performance of the virtual minister. An interesting experiment would be to see if citizen action groups can be engaged in a community-driven initiative to make the minister speak in favour of the people it serves.

Irrespective of whether Diella succeeds as a minister or not, Albania can take it as a wake-up call to fix issues such as excess red tapism. The country would do well to use AI and analyse why so many documents are to be issued in the first place. 

AI isn’t a magic wand. It won’t autocorrect existing problems. Instead, Albania can set up frameworks and legal systems to regulate the use of AI and keep it independent, while making provisions to deal with any potential fallout from AI-made decisions. 

#AIMinister #Albania #ArtificialIntelligence