.png)
4 weeks ago
7
On 11 September, the European press relayed a message from the Albanian government. The country would have the “world’s first AI minister,” it claimed. Two weeks in, the “Diella” system is not really part of the government, but Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama (pictured above) still plays along. A decree from 19 September states that he “assumes responsibility for the establishment and functioning of the virtual Ministry of Artificial Intelligence Diella.”
A chronology of failure
Edi Rama follows a long list of men who claimed to introduce Artificial Intelligence to replace and improve on human politicians.
The first attempt was probably made in 2017 by Evgeny Rodionov, a YouTuber who organized a petition to put Alisa, a virtual assistant developed by Yandex, on the ballot of the 2018 Russian presidential election. While his website claimed that AI was “running for president,” there is no indication that he even attempted to submit the candidacy.
A year later, a team of researchers from Aotearoa-New Zealand introduced SAM, a conversational bot presented as “a representative for the future.” Sam was supposed to provide “true representation” of the people’s wishes as well as “better policy for everyone.” While it didn’t “rule out running for office itself one day,” the project’s last social media activity dates from March 2018, two years before the next general election.
Some did make it to the ballot. In 2023, Andrew Gray, a lawyer, presented the “first AI-powered” candidate to the press, and promised to use a software called Polis to become a “superhuman Member of Parliament.” He was a candidate in northern England in the general election and collected 99 votes (out of 36,000).
In 2024, Victor Miller was candidate for mayor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He (falsely) claimed to be “the first person to put artificial intelligence directly on the ballot.” 327 persons out of 11,500 voted for him, a marked improvement over Andrew Gray’s performance in England the year prior but still short of political relevance.
The governing machine
The introduction of AI avatars sometimes takes place within the government, with similar results. Romania introduced Ion, “the world’s first AI councilor,” in March 2023. The machine was supposed to analyze and summarize the wishes of Romanians. The Prime Minister demonstrated the tool in a live “dialogue,” but it later appeared that it had been staged. The official website for Ion went unresponsive in early 2025.
The dream of governing machines performing better than humans is nothing new. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes famously described the state as “an artificial man” with an “artificial soul” in his magnum opus Leviathan. AI avatars are now trying to make good on the almost 400-year-old metaphor.
The basic premise shared by Hobbes and his unsuspecting, modern-day followers is that human activity can be fully translated into machine-usable information. Provided a good enough machine, these pieces of information can be interpreted and acted upon more efficiently than a human ever could. The failure of previous attempts, such as the Soviet Union’s planning apparatus, were only due to the machine’s technical limitations, the thinking implies. (It is worth noting that Hobbes fully recognized the role of human agency in the perpetuation of the state; he wasn’t entirely sold on the machine metaphor himself.)
The corruption machine
As more recent scholars well know, the state is not a machine and politics can only be done by animals, usually humans. The failure of AI candidates and government councilors is probably inevitable. But Diella, the Albanian minister, is different.
Unlike other avatars, Diella is not in charge of proposing policy or monitoring the desires of the electorate. Diella shall be in charge of public procurement. Details of how the software will work have not been made public, but it is likely that it will decide, at least in part, on what bids are selected in public tenders.
Émile Diaz, a former gangster from Marseilles, once described public tenders as a “money fountain, where everyone can pig out.” Indeed, collusion between state officials and tendering companies are relatively frequent, with the latter offering to give back a portion of the project’s cost to the state official, in exchange for accepting the (largely inflated) tender.
Organizing such collusion, however, can be risky. Having an unauditable black-box select the tenders solves much of the problem. Direct interference in the software’s code or more subtle intervention such as poisoning the training data could give undue advantage to certain bidders favored by the government without leaving a trace.
Of course, Albanian prime minister Edi Rama is innocent until proven guilty. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Diella outlives most other AI avatars in politics.
