Years 2023–2024 were marked by the arrival of AI regulation around the world, including the EU AI Act and the US, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean regulation. Together with international AI frameworks from G7, G20, UNESCO, OECD, and GPAI, this high-level guidance is phrased in the language of values and principles but requires further operationalisation to have a real impact on the design of AI systems. At the same time, frontier AI models, especially generative AI, increasingly influence human cognition and behaviour. The transformer revolution and the ensuing rapid increase in the quality of AI systems go hand in hand with the important role played by the study of human behaviour and cognition. This mutual influence between human cognition and AI systems underscores the urgent need for practical ethics guidance and adjusted ethics-by-design measures.
Against this background AIOLIA provides a robust 3-tier response to the complex challenges posed by the need to operationally interpret the EU AI Act and global AI regulation.
- Recognising the gap between ethical values and their practical application in engineering, AIOLIA pioneers a bottom-up approach to operationalise AI ethics with regard to human condition and behaviour. Following a selection of real-world use cases, AIOLIA translates high-level principles into actionable and contextual guidelines co-created by leading academic, policy, and ethics-aware industrial partners who represent diverse professional and geographic European and international contexts.
- AIOLIA’s commitment to context-sensitivity is deepened by crafting modular, inclusive training materials following the ADDIE methodology designed to cater to diverse learning needs. Hosted on the Embassy of Good Science, AIOLIA materials will range from lectures, videos, and mock reviews to such innovative formats as podcasts, Tiktoks, and a chatbot teaching AI ethics.
- AIOLIA’s outreach is amplified by encompassing 7 research ethics and integrity networks and 3 prominent computer science networks. This strategic alignment enables us to effectively recruit training participants and disseminate human-centric ethics guidelines to a wide spectrum of stakeholders, from ethics experts to early-stage researchers and policymakers worldwide. Resolutely European, AIOLIA’s vision propagates beyond EU, embracing global cooperation with leading universities and think tanks in China, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. Utilizing UNESCO platform with its reach to Africa and South Asia, AIOLIA’s guidelines evolve into an analytic toolbox for key international AI dialogues and processes. This global perspective ensures that AIOLIA’s impact is not only significant but also sustainable, contributing to fair scientific cooperation and providing concrete and culturally informed ethics instruments to shape the next generation of AI systems.
