No person. No firm. No passport. Yet in the tiny Balkan country of Albania, “Diella,” or ‘Dielli,’ is officially a cabinet minister. Originally a digital assistant on the government’s e-Albania portal, Diella was promoted to the position of the world’s first virtual minister of artificial intelligence by Prime Minister Edi Rama in September.
Dressed in an Albanian folkloric dress and powered by algorithms, Diella’s artificial intelligence avatar smiled from a government monitor. Rama promised a new era in which “public tenders will be 100% incorruptible and every public fund 100% transparent.” In a country that has long fought corruption, the promise rang familiar. But behind Diella’s digital smiles lies a very human question: What happens to accountability when power has no human face?
When President Bajram Begaj approved the new 16-member cabinet on September 15, Diella was absent. The virtual minister, announced with great fanfare by Rama, had no mention in the official document. Instead, Article 2 of the decree assigned Rama himself “responsibility for the creation and functioning of the virtual ministry,” effectively placing the system under his direct authority.
In practice, the act gave Rama control over an entity that has no legal existence. According to Article 100 of Albania’s constitution, every member of the Council of Ministers must be a natural person, someone capable of deliberating, voting, and holding moral and political responsibility.
“The very notion of a ‘minister of artificial intelligence’ has no basis in the Albanian constitution,” said legal expert Sokol Hazizaj. “The constitutional meaning of the word minister is inseparable from a natural person and the responsibilities that attach to that role. A minister is accountable to citizens — something that no algorithm can do.”
Hazizaj said that laws on personal data protection and civil service only touched on peripheral issues of accountability, without defining how AI could function or who is legally responsible for its actions.
'Just a chatbot'
Since Diella’s debut as minister, the Albanian government has not provided details about the AI’s training data, underlying code, or human oversight. On the e-Albania portal, Diella still appears as a smiling avatar greeting users with simple answers, but there is no evidence that AI has a real role in decision-making.
“Right now, Diella is just a chatbot, not an autonomous system,” said Besmir Semanaj, who has 17 years of experience in information technology. “Artificial intelligence can support government decisions if properly trained and monitored, but the real problem is transparency: We don’t know what data it relies on or who is responsible for maintaining it.”
Adopted in 2024 as the world’s first comprehensive regulation on artificial intelligence, the European Union’s AI act classifies such systems as high-risk. Any algorithm that impacts public administration in the European Union must be reviewed and approved by a human decision-maker – a safeguard against what the EU calls “automation without accountability.”
As a candidate for EU membership, Albania is not yet obliged to adhere to these standards, but the government has pledged to align its legislation with European Union laws. “If we build systems enabled by artificial intelligence, we must also build institutions to monitor and control them,” Semanaj said. “Investments in artificial intelligence must go hand in hand with investments in oversight, otherwise we risk creating systems that we cannot supervise.”
A political distraction?
When Albania's new parliament convened on September 18 to present the government's program for a fourth term, tensions immediately flared. What was supposed to be a political debate ended within minutes amid shouting, banging tables and leaving the room. As Rama, who is directly responsible for the virtual minister of artificial intelligence, paused to give the floor to Diella, the screens in the hall lit up.
A digital figure appeared in traditional Albanian costume, speaking in a soft, synthetic voice, a fusion of folklore and code. “Judge me not by my origin, but by my function,” Diella told lawmakers. “I may not be human, but I am a constitutionalist. I serve the people who write the constitution.”
Moments later, right-wing opposition lawmakers, who dispute the legitimacy of the May elections that determined the composition of Parliament, walked out of the chamber in protest.
Artan Fuga, a professor of communication and member of the Albanian Academy of Sciences, said Diella was less a technological milestone than an act of political distraction. “Rama used artificial intelligence to create a second center of attention,” he says. “Instead of debating the legitimacy or program of the government, the opposition found itself debating an avatar.”
Fuga said the risks, however, were not theatrical. “At a time when Albania still questions whether its elections are truly free, we are told that there is no longer any need to control the government through parliament, to express the will of the citizens or to demand ethical transparency, because pure intelligence can do it all,” he said.
Beyond the political experiment lies a deeper question: Who, ultimately, decides? Technically, Diella could one day make decisions in an official capacity. But Albanians are not so sure whether Diella should be given the power to do so. “Algorithms can process information — but they can’t weigh moral consequences,” Fuga said. “Once you elevate technical rationality over political accountability, you risk erasing democracy itself.”/DW
