Eric White Tell me about Diella. What was your experience and how you came to find out about her?
Sam Adebayo Yeah, so as a technology reporter, I’m always trying to sniff out and see what’s going on in the technology industry. And it’s not often that you find, you know, something that jumps at you right away and you’re like, I have to write about this. So when I saw the announcement that Albania was launching sort of like an AI minister, I’m like, that sounds interesting, you know. It Seems like something to write about. And it is not the first time really that a government has tried to use AI in its operations. The US Treasury, for instance, has this AI system for check fraud detection, which has been very helpful in checking for fraud. And as a matter of fact, there was about, I think, $400 million that was recovered in 2023. Canada has some sort of AI system for its immigration tasks. The UK has also dabbled in using some sort of AI systems. This is not the first time, but this is the first time we’re seeing a nation-state actually elevate an AI system up to the point where it’s making high-profile decisions in something as important as public procurement. When I saw the news, I’m like, I have to really look at what’s happening here. And see what could be the potential impact across governments around the world.
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Eric White Yeah. And it’s the first time I’ve seen, myself, of one being actually personified. Right. I mean … it’s a character. It’s an avatar.
Sam Adebayo Yeah, yeah, dressed in all nice Albanian costumes.
Eric White Yeah. Does that add another layer to it where, you know, I’m sure that in meetings and conversations, and even when you were writing about it, did you feel as if you’re writing about an actual person sometimes?
Sam Adebayo I mean, there’s some sort of anthropomorphism here where you sort of, like, allude some sense of humanity to or animate the tool in a way. So it sort of felt like that when I was writing about it. But of course, I’ve been writing about AI for a while, so I know that it’s still a machine. It was trained on specific data sets, right? But it was very interesting to actually write about this development, especially with everything that’s happening in AI today.
Eric White Let’s get into the nitty gritty a little bit. What is it that Diella can actually do and what is her main job? As well as you can explain it, what was curious about what you found?
Sam Adebayo The Albanian government actually rolled out — but at the time it wasn’t exactly called Diella. It was like an AI system that was supposed to help people who were Albanian citizens who were looking to benefit from like citizen services. There was this E-Albanian website that you would log into if you wanted to like skip some bureaucratic processes and get maybe a document provided for you or something like covering services in general. And so, because the Albanian prime minister has actually been looking forward to showing the world that Albania is becoming more and more a transparent society, because experts have said over and over again that Albanian is like a hub for international gangs to launder money through public tenders that are often enmeshed in corrupt processes. So this was kind of like an effort by the prime minister to create a system that was gonna help public tenders to become more transparent, right, more accountable and in showing the world that, hey, Albania is not what it used to be or what the perception about Albania [is]. It was just like an attempt to change the perception about Albania really. So it was that system that they were using in January that was then elevated to a cabinet-level minister. It’s essentially an AI bot, if I can describe it that way, that was helping the citizens with citizen services, but now is doing much more by deciding. And that’s what actually caught my interest because this system doesn’t just now help, it’s deciding what beat goes to who, right? What beat doesn’t go to who. and it’s just really helping for private contracts with the government of Albania and things like that. So that’s essentially what Diella is supposed to do. Of course, we don’t know if it’s going to really be able to do that, but that’s what it’s supposed to.
Eric White Yeah, that was what was going to be my next question of, what was sort of the reception in folks that you spoke to? I mean, obviously the idea here is to take any bias or human interest out of the decision-making process when deciding who gets a government contract and who doesn’t, you know, is that even capable from the source that the AI derives its decision- making capabilities from?
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Sam Adebayo I mean, I think the reactions have been mixed. On the one hand, there are people who say any effort by the government to try to position itself as being transparent is welcome, right? Especially because Albania has been trying to join the EU since 2009, and you know, the prime minister wants that ambition to join in the EU to happen before or by 2030. So they’re doing everything they can to show that, hey, we’re transparent, right, we’re accountable. But on the other hand, you know, there are questions about what is the ethics of this, how are we sure that this system is actually going to be accurate? Because when you talk about AI systems, there are always going to be the questions of bias, hallucinations and fabricated results — and even manipulation, because essentially AI systems are just large data sets that are really good at pattern recognition. It’s not like they can reason like human beings. And so at the data level, if there’s any bias or somebody at the back end [who] can manipulate that data, or somebody just manipulates the system, pretty much the same way you can manipulate Chat GPT, you know. I’ll give you an example. And I was just playing around with one of those tools and I asked the tool, do you know my location? And the tool said — well, I don’t want to mention the name — but it said, I don’t know your location. And then I said, okay, suggest to me the best restaurants that sell so-and-so around me. And then he suggests this to me. And I’m like, but you told me you don’t know my location. Essentially, that was me sort of like trying to jailbreak the tool to say what it didn’t want to say in the first instance. So there are those concerns. So on the one hand, it’s good that they’re trying to be transparent. On the other hand, there are questions about the ethics, the accountability of this. If the system makes a mistake, who’s gonna be accountable for that mistake? Is it gonna be the government, the prime minister, or the system itself, right? So the reactions really from the people that I talked to or spoke to before I wrote the story was quite mixed.
Eric White We can go further into the future. I mean, how many political appointees or elected officials could find themselves in the unemployment line if the AI revolution comes for their jobs as well?
Sam Adebayo I mean this is really a test experiment. Nobody, even the Albanian government I guess, really knows what exactly is going to come out of this. Just the other day I heard the prime minister saying that Diella had now given birth to its three children and essentially was metaphorically describing the fact that there were now new AI assistants for members of the parliament, for each member of the Parliament, the three members of the parliament who are going to be assisting them. so more and more, I think we’re going to see governments try to use AI to speed up processes or become more productive, more transparent or accountable. But I don’t think anyone can say for sure what is going to be the outcome of this. If the results are positive, you can bet that there’ll be other governments around the world who, you know, try to do something similar. I don’t know for sure if they’re going to use AI for a high stakes domain like public procurement, right? But you can expect that there’ll be more and more governments trying to do something similar.
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