Jul 2026· AI and Ethics· Vol 6· 0 citations· 49 references
TL;DR
A coalescent ethics of AI design is developed by bringing three converging bodies of scholarship into productive dialogue: the coalescent agency framework’s functional criteria for preserving human agency in human-AI systems; the enactive artificial intelligence model’s intersectional and gender-inclusive design prescriptions; and recent empirical findings on how Gen Z users in China construct gendered meanings in their interactions with generative AI.
Within EU governing body texts, the same discursive patterns that map agency and erase the middle ground of debate in AI are found, helping to marginalise alternative perspectives from other stakeholders and prevent nuanced understandings of potential harms.
Bríd-Áine Parnell· The International Journal of...· 0 citations
AI is increasingly embedded in government, yet its meanings and implications remain contested and often misunderstood. Science fiction is an important yet underexplored source shaping public understandings of AI by generating collective imaginaries through polarized narratives. This paper introduces a typology structured along three axes: scale of governance (micro, meso, macro), type of AI (robotic, conversational, algorithmic), and narrative role (helper, subject, opponent). We apply the typology to 76 films and 68 reflective essays from university students. Findings reveal an overrepresentation of conversational, antagonistic AI at micro and meso scales in fiction whereas participants overrepresent algorithmic AI at the macro scale. The findings reveal convergences and divergences that expose forms of sociotechnical blindness in how AI in government is imagined. The study contributes to research by offering a theoretical lens to analyse fictional AI narratives, comparing representations and perceptions, and introducing cultural artefacts to study AI in government.
Lisa Dewulf, Anthony Simonofski, N. B. Rosselló et al.· EGOV-CeDEM-ePart 2026· 0 citations
This research examined how public relations professionals conceptualize, enact, and advocate for responsible AI (RAI) during a period of rapid technological change. Drawing on 22 semi-structured interviews with experienced U.S.-based communications professionals and using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), the study examined how professionals navigate such core ethical values of truth, trust, and transparency while adopting AI and counseling their organizations. Findings reveal that responsible AI in public relations is not given or simply adopted but actively constructed through everyday professional judgment, human oversight, and organizational influence. The study finds that responsible AI practice depends on the interdependence of AI literacy and ethics literacy, with public relations professionals translating both into advocacy, governance, disclosure judgments, and counsel. The study introduces the AI-Ethics Literacy Model for Human Advocacy[trademark] (AELHA[trademark], pronounced “ah-LEE-ha”) as its original conceptual contribution. AELHA encodes a foundational relationship: AI Literacy + Ethics Literacy = Human Advocacy. The model proposes that neither competency alone is sufficient for responsible AI practice and that their combination enables public relations professionals to advocate not only for organizational publics, but for humanity as the emergent public of the AI age.
The paper’s central argumentative shift is to change the narrative from bias mitigation to bias management—treating bias not as a defect to be corrected but as an ongoing condition to be governed.
Gabriela Arriagada-Bruneau· Science and Engineering Ethi...· 0 citations
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into early childhood environments is most often judged through a binary lens of educational benefit versus technological harm. This framing overlooks a deeper question: how these systems reshape the ecological conditions on which child development depends. This exploratory, theory-generating conceptual inquiry examines how experts conceptualize the tension between the highly efficient illusion of agency presented by AI systems and the ecological conditions that support the development of authentic agency in young children. Using a qualitative expert-interview approach, we gathered the perspectives of six interdisciplinary scholars and analyzed them through a primarily deductive and partly inductive content analysis. Anchored in the multiple-realizability-of-agency thesis, actor-network theory, and complexity systems thinking, the analysis suggests that experts perceive AI’s simulation of interactivity, autonomy, and adaptability as potentially reducing the physical and social frictions that support developmental processes, redistributing decision-making within child–adult–AI networks, and limiting opportunities for the development of resilience. Drawing on these expert perspectives and the study’s theoretical framework, we argue for a conceptual reorientation from pedagogical scaffolding toward learning-ecosystem architecture and propose a pedagogy of friction that preserves the desirable difficulties through which authentic agency is nurtured.
Wenwei Luo, Minqi Gao, Jin Liu et al.· AI, Brain and Child· 0 citations
This research raises broad questions regarding social and tech ethics in the Age of AI by asking what happens if AI systems acquire full autonomy as economic actors within a late capitalist economy, specifically as workers, capitalists, and consumers. Through a careful engagement with recent Marxian social theory and the speculative literature on “full automation,” the article builds a case that the analytical lens of labor displacement needs to be enlarged to encompass the displacement of capitalists and consumers as well as workers. We propose to rethink social and tech ethics from the standpoint of a renewed attention to the constitutions of these economic actors within the capitalist system. Such a rethinking can cast new light on what it means for AI systems to be designed and deployed more ethically within the contemporary global capitalist system. It further underlines the urgency of a cross-disciplinary dialogue between social theorists and the engineers, managers, and regulators who are shaping the trajectory of such systems and, accordingly, the prospects for ethical social and economic outcomes.
J. Schulz, Laura Robinson, Katia Moles· International journal of kno...· 0 citations
