Imagine you are Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, starting your fourth term. Corruption scandals have long plagued your country; news agency Reuters even refers to Albania as a “hub for gangs seeking to launder their money from trafficking drugs and weapons across the world.” And yet you announce on September 11th that you want to help your country become “100% free of corruption.”

How exactly do you manage that?

You welcome an AI-generated cabinet member, of course.

I’m not making this up. I wish I were. Rama has officially appointed “Diella” (translates to ‘sun’) as a minister tasked with “public procurement”. In an interview with the BBC, Rama argued how Diella will “wipe out every potential influence on public biddings […] making the process much faster, much more efficient and totally accountable”. I recommend watching her introduction video here:

The voice is robotic, the face uncanny, and the whole thing resembles a tech demo hastily thrown together on a random Friday afternoon.

Here’s the thing: there’s not one singular AI mastermind running Diella. For her content generation and interactivity side, she’s likely a ChatGPT wrapper (a system that uses ChatGPT for core interactions, with some sort of prompt that changes how the chatbot interacts). How do I know this? Rama mentions working with a “brilliant team” (BBC), but he also claims Diella utilizes an LLM model from OpenAI that has been tuned to fit Albania’s restrictions. GPT5 is a likely suspect, as it’s OpenAI’s flagship model.

A separate video generator (likely Google’s Veo3 or Runway AI) produces the face and gestures. Humans likely wrote the prompts, adjusted the outputs, and were fully involved in the video creation process through trial and error (and editing). I encourage anyone to visit an AI image generation site (Midjourney, Adobe Firefly) and you’ll quickly discover how AI doesn’t automatically produce flawless, believable images. It requires conscious effort from you, the human moderator, to achieve realistic outputs. Video generation is a new market, and it hasn’t reached the maturity of the image space yet, so Diella’s video likely required extensive reworking by Rama’s “brilliant team.”

And that’s precisely the point. While Diella is SUPPOSED to be an icon of transparency, in reality, she’s anything but. Her model isn’t open-source, so how can we verify that she isn’t biased? She APPEARS to be on the bleeding edge of science fiction, but in reality, it’s an illusion. She CAN speak about reducing corruption, or how she has “no ambitions” (Reuters), but the real power is still entirely in the hands of Rama and the other humans prompting her.

I find that to be infinitely more dangerous.

Albania hasn’t conjured a wizard; they’ve simply created an Oz, curtain and all.