The world should pay more attention to Albania. Last week it placed itself on the cutting edge of modern politics by appointing an AI bot called Diella to its cabinet.

Diella's role is to help combat corruption, a problem as old as the country itself. The Albanian prime minister Edi Rama claims AI can't be corrupted, which is why Diella is perfectly suited to this new cabinet post.

Naturally, there are sceptics, in Albania and here in The Echidna burrow. The Albanian PM should probably research Robodebt before committing his country to an AI hell.

But the Albanian move did give us some pause for thought. What if we replaced some of our politicians with bots? Would anyone notice? The way they carry on some could already be bots.

Take Chris Bowen. He'd give ChatGPT or Google's Gemini a r

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