The Diaspora Summit was intended to be a moment of reflection on the identity, language, and connection of Albanians to their homeland. But this time, attention was not only drawn to the message of Foreign Minister Ferit Hoxha's speech, but also to another detail: the way it appeared to be written.
The text of the speech is filled with solemn sentences and metaphors for the Albanian language: the success of the diaspora as a "window to Albania", the language as "memory, identity and continuity", and the warning that without the language "only the body would remain".
Beautiful, neat, balanced words. So neat, that an artificial intelligence-generated text detection tool classifies about 80% of this text as having AI characteristics.
Of course, these tools are not definitive proof. They can be wrong. But the irony is obvious: a speech about the soul of language and national identity sounds as if it were produced by an algorithm that has neither a native language nor an identity.
This is perhaps the clearest picture of our political times: the pathos remains the same, the metaphors are the same, but the author may no longer be a person who spends hours over the text. A screen and a short command are enough.
In the end, the problem is not whether or not a program helped write the speech. It is much simpler: at a summit on diaspora and identity, should the words about the Albanian language sound like they were written by a machine? Because if even patriotic rhetoric is being produced by algorithms, then we have entered a new era: when politics speaks about the spirit of the language, but the text comes from the server.
