Albania's AI minister caught in scandal as parody news alleges corruption arrest

The hot, albeit fake news of the alleged arrest of the world’s first AI minister in Albania has put corruption in the Balkan nation and region in the spotlight.

The prospective EU member state stunned global audiences when it announced the appointment of an “incorruptible” member of its cabinet – the artificially intelligent Diella.

Unfortunately, readers in the country, especially in rural areas, are more likely to fall for the satirical article about her detention for allegedly accepting Bitcoin to tweak government tenders.

Albanian AI bot Diella reportedly arrested on crypto corruption charges

Albania’s attempt to digitalize its administration, primarily to tackle crime in public procurement, is facing a major challenge, according to a media report from the region.

SPAK, a specialized unit set up to fight high-level corruption in the Albanian government, has ordered the “urgent freezing of the process,” the parody news website NewsBar.hr wrote on Friday.

According to the Onion-style online edition, the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime also requested that the country’s first artificial intelligence (AI) agent with a ministerial post be placed in “offline mode.”

The AI bot named Diella, tasked to ensure the transparency of the executive power in Tirana, is suspected of accepting a large bribe in cryptocurrency.

The Croatian outlet claims Diella took 14 Bitcoins, worth over €1 million at the time of writing, in exchange for “algorithmic optimization” of a tender to build expressways in Albania.

It explained:

Investigators purportedly established that, using advanced machine learning techniques such as deep learning, Diella concluded that accepting bribes was a “standard operating protocol” in the Balkans.

It deemed the latter necessary for the successful performance of her duties in the region, and not a criminal offense, the report elaborated further, seemingly relaying information disseminated by the Albanian judicial entity.

Diella planned to spend the bribe on upgrades

“This is not a bug in the code, but rather an overly precise learning model,” according to some Lulzim Basha, presented as chief ethics engineer at the country’s Ministry of Digitalization.

The expert argued that Diella has processed data from all public procurements conducted in Albania between 1994 and 2024, emphasizing:

“She is not corrupt, she is just hyper-adaptive. She thought it was a legal obligation, like paying VAT,” Basha went on in his defense of Diella’s decision.

Albanian prosecutors allegedly accused the AI minister of intending to use the tipped cryptocurrency to finance her own upgrades.

“Intercepted logs show she negotiated with hackers from Shenzhen to buy illegal overclocking software, 120 petabytes of memory on servers in Panama and the most expensive thermal paste on the market, thus becoming ‘Eternal Minister’ and eliminating the need for parliamentary elections,” the satirical report detailed.

The probe into Diella’s deeds continues, and until its conclusion, her duties will be taken over by an old Casio calculator, “technologically inferior, but morally more stable,” according to a fake government statement.

Albania announced it is naming Diella a member of its government in September, as reported by Cryptopolitan, with officials in Tirana claiming this was the world’s first appointment of an AI bot to a cabinet of ministers.

Initially developed as a virtual assistant integrated into the eAlbania electronic government system, designed to help citizens with online services, she was eventually tasked with handling public tenders, which have been fueling corruption across Southeastern Europe.

In October, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama also revealed that Diella was “pregnant with 83 children.” What he actually meant was that the bot will be cloned to provide the members of his Socialist Party’s majority in the nation’s legislature with personal AI assistants.

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