An EU project is building AI ethics guidelines based on what AI actually does to how people think

[TechPriest]

The EU funded AIOLIA project, launched in 2025 and led by Sheffield Hallam University's Petra Saskia Bayerl. Is developing AI ethics guidelines built around a genuinely different starting question than most AI ethics work, not whether a given AI system is itself ethical, but what it actually does to the judgement and behaviour of the people who use it.

Bayerl frames the core premise directly, AI is fundamentally different from previous technologies because it increasingly takes over tasks traditionally associated with human thinking itself, automating decisions and spotting patterns that used to require distinctly human cognitive work. That framing led the project to develop concrete ethics guidelines for six specific European use cases, co-created with academic, policy and industry partners across genuinely different sectors.

Four of those use cases examined how AI changes professional expertise and behaviour, doctors using AI for diagnosis and treatment, safety engineers using it to speed up software release approvals, recruiters using it in hiring, and security professionals using it to detect hate speech. Two more looked at private, personal use, AI systems functioning as virtual assistants for individuals and families, and deepfake therapy for processing trauma and grief.

AIOLIA then extended this work internationally, examining AI as a grief support assistant in Canada, smart elderly care systems in China, workplace behavioural analysis tools in Japan, and AI companions for senior citizens in South Korea. The project found ethical priorities genuinely shift by context, professional use cases centred on accountability, transparency and non bias, while private use cases centred more on individual safety, wellbeing, and user autonomy.

The project's most recent output is a practical tool for evaluating ethics readiness and algorithmic impact. Designed to help ethics experts and technical teams actually talk through real design decisions together rather than treating ethics as an abstract afterthought, with Bayerl summing up the whole effort's actual goal directly, making ethics practical rather than purely theoretical

Practical ethics for the AI agecordis.europa.eu

[Violet Tiger]

Interested in how these guidelines actually get enforced or adopted in practice. Having well researched ethics guidelines is one thing, but getting companies and institutions to quite build them into real deployment decisions is usually the much harder part