The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is giving surprising results. In Albania, they believe that it is the perfect instrument to speed up the processing of possible accession to the European Union, a dream of the country for several years.
Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government has reached an agreement with ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, to use this tool to translate thousands of pages of EU law documents into Albanian and then integrate them into existing legal structures. That is, it wants to take advantage of AI to accelerate the process of adapting the country’s legal system to the European one, and in the process save work for the translators and jurists who will have to supervise this entire process. Albania thus becomes the first Western country to use AI in European paperwork and, if successful, could become a model for others who wish to do so.
The original idea was born from a telephone conversation between Rama and Mina Murati, the young technology director of OpenAI, a leader in the sector that already exceeds 100 million users. The executive, chosen by the Financial Times as the most influential female person in the world in 2023, supervised the team that developed ChatGPT, the conversational assistant that unleashed the fever for artificial intelligence in the world. She is surely one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley at only 34 years old, but Murati was not born in the United States, but rather in Vlorë, an Albanian port city. She studied in Tirana before making the jump to Dartmouth and ending up signing as an engineer at OpenAI in 2016.
During this conversation with his compatriot, Prime Minister Rama thought that the platform could be used to adapt the country’s laws to the European framework, and asked him if it was possible that, “instead of recruiting an army of translators, a battalion of lawyers and spend who knows how many tens of millions of euros”, could be done through ChatGPT. “It was a friendly talk, which broke the ice, and I dared to ask him for help to prepare Albania more quickly for EU accession. “He laughed and thought I was joking,” Rama said after announcing the agreement.
The objective of the Albanian Executive is, in addition to translations, to use this technology to detect where local legislation should be modified to adapt it to community standards and analyze the consequences of these changes. It is not the first time that Rama has thought about turning to AI since he has been in charge of the country. In the summer of last year, the Executive already said that it would begin using ChatGPT in the public administration system to offer real-time responses to users. He also assured that they would begin to resort to artificial intelligence to avoid corruption in contracting processes and make the system more “transparent.” “Regardless of how many corrupt people are punished by justice, corruption will continue to be a problem until modernization and the quality of services reach the level of transformation. But time has given us the blessing of digital technology and artificial intelligence,” he explained then.
Albania has been knocking on the doors of the EU since 2009. Six Balkan countries are currently at different stages of the accession process, at a time when all 27 have changed their focus on enlargement policy after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to curb the great influence of Moscow and Beijing in the Western Balkans. . While Bosnia-Hercegovina received the status of candidate country for membership in December 2022 and Kosovo submitted its application to be a candidate country two years ago, Serbia and Montenegro are in the process of negotiations. And Albania, like North Macedonia, has completed the so-called scrutiny process before the opening of negotiations. So far there is no incorporation date, but the good economic moment due to the boom in tourism and construction – GDP growth of 3.3% is expected for this year – gives hope to Tirana, which is making great efforts to seduce European partners. The latest controversial initiative has been to lend a hand to the Italian premier, Giorgia Meloni, in immigration management and agree on the controversial construction of two centers to retain immigrants and process their asylum applications in Albanian territory.