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.

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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 run for their money with his lightning fast retrieval of talking points. Faced with questions from the opposition he has an uncanny ability to rattle off entire spreadsheets of numbers and percentages in the limited time he has to answer. Resistance crumbles in a fog of figures by the time he resumes his seat. We suspect he is a bot.

In the lead-up to the May 2 election, there were early signs the now deputy opposition leader Ted O'Brien was a bot. His fervent, almost evangelical, promotion of nuclear energy didn't seem human. And there was that unnatural light in the eyes, as if lit from within by some kind of micro-reactor approaching meltdown. Interview after interview, there seemed to be no stopping him. It was as if Boston Dynamics had reworked one of its robot dogs into a suit. Until Peter Dutton pulled the plug on any talk of nuclear, that is, and the light went out of Ted's LEDs.

With her carefully scripted pronouncements on foreign affairs, Penny Wong is surely a bot. In her opposition days, demolishing government ministers and senior bureaucrats in Senate estimates, she was an autonomous weapon programmed to kill without mercy. In government, she's........

© Canberra Times