🇦🇱Edi RamaAlbania · UNGA 81 speech

Well, it seems that my turn to preach in this desert where we gather every year came, and I take that as a privilege of the few. Mr. President, dear representatives of the peoples of the United Nations, I've been very positively surprised that A lot of friends wanted to know about what's going on in our country with artificial intelligence. And I thought it's a good idea to share with you my thoughts. Gunpowder changed the battlefields. Nuclear fission changed the meaning of human survival. Artificial intelligence is changing something even more intimate. Who can enter the minds of a citizen, imitate a trusted voice, manufacture a reality calibrated to one person's fears, and do so millions and millions of time at once? Albania is not a developer of frontier models. But we are a nation that has already lived the future others are still debating. And I think a simple message is what we owe to all of you. The greatest immediate danger is not that artificial intelligence will stop obeying humanity. The greatest danger is that it will obey the wrong human beings perfectly. The challenge comes in three layers. What artificial intelligence does instead of us, what it does to us, and who gains the power to reach us. First, what it does instead of us. The public debate imagines machines that awaken, acquire ambitions, and turn against their creators. But the systems confronting us today do not wake up with hatred in their hearts. They multiply ours. They have no ambition of their own. They serve the ambition of others. They carry no flag, but they can be deployed by a state. They tell no lie for their own benefit, but they can tell a billion lies on others' behalf. The machine has no conscience, but it can borrow the reach of a government, the precision of a weapon, and the intimacy of a friend. At the same time, the economic incentives surrounding artificial intelligence increasingly reward the replacement of human effort rather than the enlargement of human capacity. Write the code so that I do not have to understand it. Draft the report so that I do not have to think through it. Make the judgment so that I do not have to assume responsibility for it. When success is measured only by how much work the machine removes from the human being, we may create more efficient institutions, but we'll have less capable people. A civilization that outsources effort may eventually outsource knowledge. A civilization that outsources knowledge may eventually outsource judgment. And a civilization that outsources judgment may discover that this also outsources responsibility. This is not inevitable. It is a choice. We can build artificial intelligence that teaches rather than merely answers, guides rather than commands, and strengthens the human being instead of making the human being dependent upon it. The question cannot be only how quick did the machine complete the task. We must also ask what did the human being learned? Who understood the decision? Who can challenge the decision? And who answers for the decision when it is wrong? Albania became the first country to bring an artificial intelligence instrument into the architecture of government through Diella, our worldwide known artificial intelligence minister. We did not do this to transfer sovereignty from people to a machine. We did it to make public services more accessible, procedures more transparent, and the state more accountable. No machine possesses democratic legitimacy. No algorithm inherits constitutional responsibility. Behind every consequential public decision, there must remain a legal mandate, a human institution, and the name that can be called to give answers. The second layer is what artificial intelligence can do to us. Artificial intelligence inside an accountable state can reduce the distance between citizens and public services. Artificial intelligence outside accountability can eliminate the distance between a lie and the human mind. Albania experienced this directly. I'm sure you must have followed or just known the so-called Flamingo Revolution, a fabricated narrative of an Israeli invasion of the Albanian coast. An invasion that never occurred was manufactured, was personalized, and delivered through voices, pages, and channels citizens already trusted. One citizen received a story of national betrayal. Another received a story of religious provocation. Another received a conspiracy of foreign occupation. Different fabrications entered different emotional worlds, all serving the same strategic lie. The consequences were real. Citizens had their own reasons to protest, don't take me wrong. But suddenly, they started to protest also against a phantom enemy. Antisemitic tropes entered our public discourse for the first time ever. Don't forget, Albania is the only country in Europe that ended World War II with more Jews than it started it. Fear became anger. Anger became mobilization. And fabrication became political reality. And This is not and was not a laboratory experiment. I'm not talking to you about a science fiction movie. It was a Tuesday in Tirana, our capital city. The algorithm did not invent the objective. A human actor did. The algorithm did not develop hatred. It discovered how to activate ours. This is systematic fraud as a service. Election interference no longer requires one television station or one piece of propaganda repeated to an entire population. It can now operate at the resolution of each and every one voter. Two neighbors may stand in the same street, vote in the same election, and inhabit entirely different realities, each manufactured specifically for each of them. When that happens, democracy does not merely lose a debate or just an election turn. It loses the common ground on which debate is possible, and it loses the turn to have it. Sovereignty no longer erodes only at the border. It erodes in the feed. In the 20th century, sovereignty meant control over land, territorial waters, and national airspace. Today, in Europe, we are running like crazy to add more and more and more from the money we don't have to protect our land and to protect our skies for a potential future war. But somehow we are forgetting that in the century we are living, it must also mean the capacity of a free society to defend the conditions under which its citizens form their own judgment. Without that capacity, sovereignty over the land, over the sky becomes just an illusion. And then comes the third layer reach. For centuries, the great threat to freedom of speech was censorship. Today, freedom of speech is threatened by the weaponization of the freedom of reach. Speech is the right to express an idea. Reach is the power to place that idea before millions of people. Speech belongs to human beings. Reach can be purchased. automated, manipulated, and secretly assigned by platforms, corporations, criminal networks, and foreign states. The right to speak is universal, but there is no universal right to anonymous, unlimited, and artificially amplified reach. When one lie can be multiplied a billion times, truth does not need to be censored anymore. because it is simply buried. The citizen remains formally free to speak, but speaks into a storm that no human voice can match. Freedom of speech can therefore be defeated without banning a single book, without imprisoning a single journalist, without deleting a single post. The answer to bad speech remains more speech. But the answer to covert industrial amplification must come, and must come sooner more than it will be too late. And it's called exposure. Who created the message? Who paid for it? Was it spread by people or by machines? Why was the citizen targeted? Was the apparent public reaction authentic, coordinated, or foreign-directed? Defending democracy and defending a way of life and defending the freedom of each and every nation to live in its own way does not mean controlling what people are allowed to think. It means revealing the hidden powers seeking to control what people are made to see. If we protect freedom of speech while leaving the control of reach completely opaque, we defend the door while surrendering the whole room. Some respond by demanding that artificial intelligence be slowed or stopped. We are too small, but we respectfully have to disagree. Opposed by democracies, will not produce a pause by dictatorships. A moratorium observed by responsible states will not restrain hostile powers, criminal international networks, or industries of manipulation. We cannot regulate ourselves into helplessness. On this essential strategic question, the President of the United States is right. We cannot stop We must accelerate. But acceleration must have a direction. We need artificial intelligence that is verifiable, transparent, and accountable, built by free society, shared among allies, and placed in the service of citizens. The answer to weaponized automation is not technological surrender. It is democratic capacity. It is sovereign capability. It is better artificial intelligence in the hands of those who remain accountable under the law of the land. Sovereign artificial intelligence does not mean isolation. It means that no nation should be helpless before systems it cannot understand, it cannot inspect, and forget about challenging them. Every country must be able to protect its language. authenticate public communications, detect coordinated manipulation, preserve evidence, and inform its citizens without depending entirely on the commercial priorities of a very distant operation. This is why Albania, in its own microscopic scale compared to this gigantic challenge, is building an artificial intelligence-based digital mirror. The mirror will identify manipulation in real time, will test claims against authoritative information, will reveal coordinated patterns and help citizens understand not only what they are seeing, but also how and why it has reached them. It will not tell citizens what they must think. Truth cannot be decreed by any government. It must be evidenced, sourced, tested, challenged, and defended out in the open. Our mirror is not intended to become an arbiter of opinion. It is intended to become an infrastructure of transparency. It does not seek to create a ministry of truth, God forbid. It seeks to defend society against an industry of lies. Albania, therefore, calls for an international compact for sovereign and democratic artificial intelligence. First, citizens must know when politically consequential content has been artificially generated or materially manipulated. Second, the architecture of reach should become transparent. Citizens and states must be able to know who created, who financed, who targeted, and who artificially amplified consequential political content. Third, every consequential use of artificial intelligence by a public institution

must preserve a clear chain of human and legal accountability. Fourth, democracies must create a shared early warning system so that evidence of artificial intelligence driven manipulation can travel between all like minded nations as quickly as the manipulation itself. And smaller nations and smaller languages must not be abandoned outside this protective architecture. Digital sovereignty cannot become a privilege, again, reserved for the richest states. Lies travel without visas. Lies do not care about walls, about border controls. Algorithms cross borders without need of any passport. and without fear of any type of government. Those attacking our countries already cooperate across jurisdictions. Our countries, our democracies, first and foremost, must learn to do the same. This is not ultimately a contest between humanity and machines. It is a contest between different human purposes each amplified by machines, between those who use artificial intelligence to enlighten and those who use it to obscure, between those who use it to empower their own people and those who use it to manipulate them, between those who accept responsibility and those who hide behind automation. We should not fear that machines will become too human. We should fear that human beings will become invisible behind machines. Dear friends, every generation is called upon to defend freedom in the territory where freedom is most threatened. For one generation, that territory was the battlefield. For another, it was the ballot box. For ours, it's very clear. It is the human mind. Let us ensure that no citizen is left alone before an increasingly terrifying algorithmic army. Let us ensure that no small nation is forced to rent its understanding of reality from beyond its borders. Let us ensure that no democracy wakes up after an election to discover that its people exercise their freedom of choice inside the world secretly designed for them by someone they could not see and they are not even aware that is the force behind their choice. Artificial intelligence will not decide whether this century belongs to liberty or to manipulation. We will. The machine will obey. The question is whom it will obey. Under what law and in the service of what purpose? Albania has made its own modest choice. We choose acceleration, no surrender. We choose innovation, no abdication. We choose augmentation, no atrophy of human capacity. We choose freedom of speech, We know what it is to live without it. And precisely because we choose it, we refuse to confuse it with the unchecked freedom of machines, money, and foreign powers to reach everyone everywhere without disclosure. We choose the truth, not because truth is always easy or comfortable, but because without a shared commitment to reality, there cannot be a shared public life and without that commitment of all of us to the reality of world we live in we are engaged in the most horrendous betrayal that parents of this world in the history of humanity have done to their own children and without a shared world there cannot be United Nations. And well, my preaching in the desert ends here. And my hope is the last resort I rely on. Thank you very much.