Hey Siri, has anyone succumbed to the corrupting influence of money and power today? Earlier this week, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama announced that the country would institute a new minister focused on corruption. That minister: Diella, an AI-powered chatbot.
Diella, which is Albanian for “Sun,” has been up and running the Albanian government since January of this year, when it launched as a virtual assistant designed to help citizens navigate e-Albania, a digital platform for accessing government services. According to reporting from CNN affiliate A2 at the time of its launch, the chatbot is built on OpenAI’s large language model and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. And while it was initially tasked with helping people interact with government systems, it is now being charged with monitoring for potential corruption within the government.
“Diella, the first cabinet member who is not physically present, but has been virtually created by AI,” Rama said Thursday, according to The Guardian, and will aim to create “a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption.” The task of awarding government contracts will be taken out of the hands of ministries and entrusted entirely to Diella, which Rama called “the servant of public procurement,” according to Politico.
In its new role, the chatbot will be used to review every proposal made by private companies to fulfill government contracts and assess each bid on its merits. Per Rama, the AI tool will have the ability to award contracts to “talents here from all over the world,” while mitigating “the fear of prejudice and rigidity of the administration.”
Corruption in government contracts is a major issue for Albania, which has been seeking accession into the European Union since 2009. The EU has repeatedly criticized the country for corruption and encouraged it to adopt new rules to help crack down on the problem to solidify its application to become a member state. To its credit, Albania has made progress on that front, passing major legal reforms that led to the removal of many judges and prosecutors with ties to criminal organizations.
Of course, AI is not itself objective or free of bias and is heavily informed by the source information that it is trained on. But it presumably is less likely to succumb to some human temptations, and there is some research to suggest that AI tools can be deployed to help in procurement integrity, fraud detection, and anti-money laundering efforts—though that assumes it is being deployed in a way that doesn’t simply serve the interests of those who are deploying it. Power tends to corrupt, so we’ll have to see how well data holds up.
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