The Albanian authorities plan to utilise ChatGPT to translate thousands of pages of EU legal measures and regulations into Shqip (Albanian).
The government intends to integrate the translated documents into existing legal structures under an agreement with the CEO of OpenAI’s parent company, Mira Murati, who was born in Albania.
Albania is the biggest EU supporter in Europe, with more than 97 per cent of respondents favouring membership, despite the fact that admission to the bloc has been delayed for 14 years. Now the government wants to use AI to speed up much of the paperwork in an attempt to facilitate the country’s earlier accession to the EU.
ChatGPT is a large artificial intelligence language model developed by Murati and her team at OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. It generates text based on questions or prompts entered by the user and can produce content: translate, compose music, write computer programmes, generate business ideas, process text and more.
The model to be used by the government will translate into Albanian and provide a detailed overview of what and where changes in local legislation should be introduced to make it compliant with EU rules. It will also provide an impact analysis of all measures and changes, which usually requires a lot of expertise and time.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama stated that the move would remove “an army of translators and a battalion of lawyers, costing millions of euros” and expedite the process.
“I heard a friendly voice that broke the ice, and I dared to ask her [Murati] for help to prepare Albania more quickly for EU membership. She laughed and thought I was joking.”
Murati eventually agreed, and a joint team of OpenAI and the National Information Society Agency (AKSHI) was established.
He reported that on December 13, at the EU summit in Brussels, he would present the draft and successful test of “the Albanian model of artificial intelligence for the interposition of the legislation totalling 280,000 pages of legal measures of the EU.”
Albania applied for EU membership in 2009 and has been an EU candidate country since 2014. Accession talks were unblocked after years of delays, mainly because their progress was tied to North Macedonia’s progress in the summer of 2022.
Greece has threatened to veto Albania’s continued accession talks over the ongoing imprisonment of Fredi Beleri, an ethnic Greek Albanian who was arrested on suspicion of bribing votes ahead of the 2023 local elections in Himare.
EU spokesman Peter Stano announced on Tuesday evening, when the European Council adopted the conclusions on enlargement, that the Commission would not intervene in the situation.
In this case, the law applies, the law must be respected, and if there are doubts, EU member states and Albania possess the instruments to provide solutions.
Rama also announced that AI will replace most of the services in local and national governments, especially in public procurement, in an attempt to stifle corruption.
“Regardless of how many corrupt individuals will be punished by new justice, corruption will continue to remain a problem until modernisation and the quality of services reaches the extent of transformation. But time has given us the blessing of digital technology and artificial intelligence.”
We will introduce procurement with AI…because the data will be taken by AI and not by the individual or company, and this will be transparent to everyone.
Albania will become the first country to use artificial intelligence to assist in the EU accession. If successful, it will have a significant impact on the process for other candidate countries.
