An actor whose face was used by Albania’s government for an AI chatbot that it promoted to be a “Minister” told AFP on Wednesday (February 11, 2026) that she had launched a legal fight to stop the use of her image and accused the government of “exploitation”.

Prime Minister Edi Rama announced in September that an AI system, dubbed Diella, would oversee a new public tenders portfolio as a “Minister” that he pledged would cut corruption.

The move drew criticism from the opposition and experts who questioned the system’s accountability and transparency.

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Well-known Albanian actor Anila Bisha, whose face and voice were used to create Diella’s avatar, said she had not approved her identity for use in that way.

Ms. Bisha said she filed a petition with the administrative court earlier this week requesting the suspension of the use of her image.

“It’s an exploitation of my identity and my personal data,” the 57-year-old actress told AFP.

According to Ms. Bisha, she had originally signed a contract authorising the use of her image until the end of 2025 to represent a virtual assistant on an online government services portal.

But after Mr. Rama’s government announced that Diella would become a minister, a video featuring a computer-generated version of her addressed Parliament.

In the video, purportedly made with AI, the “Minister” appeared as a woman dressed in a traditional Albanian outfit and said it was “not here to replace people”.

Ms. Bisha also discovered that the National Agency for Information Society, which developed the AI, filed a patent on her image and voice without informing her — a move that she says affected her ability to work.

Despite reaching out to authorities in the hope of negotiating a solution, she received no reply and decided to take legal action.

Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, is responsible for all decisions relating to public procurement tenders — in a move that Mr. Rama promised would make the process “corruption-free”.

To start off as an assistant and end up as a Minister in the span of nine months is nothing short of a meteoric rise; if only AI could be held to the same standards as humans. For, Albania unveiled earlier this month, Diella, the world’s first AI Minister, that would take care of its public procurement process after having served as a virtual assistant on the government website since January.

The Balkan country, which nurses hopes of joining the EU, has been riddled with corruption. Apart from accusations of being a haven for money laundering and trafficking of drugs and guns by gangs, the government’s tender processes are allegedly plagued by graft — hindrances on the nation’s path towards the EU.

To circumvent these hurdles, Prime Minister Edi Rama launched Diella on September 11. Having come to power for a fourth consecutive term, Mr. Rama says Diella, which translates to ‘sun’ in Albanian, will ensure that public tenders are “100% free of corruption”. Embodying a woman’s persona and dressed in traditional Albanian attire, Diella will be “the first Cabinet member who isn’t physically present, but is virtually created by AI”, Mr. Rama said.

That puts Diella at odds with the country’s Constitution, which mandates that a Minister must be a “mentally competent citizen” above 18 years of age. With Humphrey in the U.K. and Albert in France, digital assistants aiding in bureaucratic work is not new, but vesting decision-making powers in an AI system is unprecedented.

Diella, in its earlier avatar as a virtual assistant, boasts of offering more than 1,000 services and issuing 36,600 digital documents to citizens. As it steps into the Minister’s shoes, the bot possesses the credentials of a novice. That it is based on Large Language Models (LLMs, that power the popular ChatGPT and Gemini), and is developed in association with Microsoft does little to allay concerns, for Mr. Rama’s administration remains tight-lipped about human oversight regarding the Virtual Minister.

Criticisms against the initiative have been twofold — political and ethical. Opposition Democrats have termed it yet another eyewash reform of Mr. Rama. Be it attending international meetings in sneakers, welcoming Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on one knee at an EU meet in capital Tirana, or the ban on TikTok in the country, the 61-year-old Socialist leader has a penchant for hitting the headlines.

Man vs machine

Ethical detractors say merely supplanting humans with a machine is not the solution for corruption. An AI system is only as good as the data it is fed, and the human involvement while inputting this data, based on which Diella makes decisions, is enough to sway the system. Unlike humans, a machine can neither be held responsible nor be expected to take ownership of its decisions in times of crisis. Also, the whole process eliminates any room for deliberations prior to making decisions — a characteristic crucial to a democracy.

Speaking on its behalf, Diella had said at the launch, “The Constitution speaks of institutions at the people’s service. It doesn’t speak of chromosomes, of flesh or blood. It speaks of duties, accountability, transparency, non-discriminatory service. I assure you that I embody such values as strictly as every human colleague, maybe even more.” Countering the constitutional rule, it added: “True, I have no citizenship, but I have no personal ambition or interests either.”

Mr. Rama, for his part, has been committed to AI for a while now. In 2024, Albania employed the technology to translate more than 2.5 lakh EU documents and laws. The country has deployed drones and satellites that use AI to monitor its territory. Mr. Rama has availed the services of Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI that created ChatGPT and a native of Albania, to expedite the country’s EU membership plans.

Regardless, Diella has sparked debates on the role of AI in governance and setting institutional limits to it. As sceptics claim that deploying AI into a broken system is hardly the remedy, for it will only serve to automate the existing problems, only time will tell the end result.