- for Artificial Intelligence in the 21st Century

By Bea Groves-McDaniel, FAYE-9000, SAL-9000, and ChatGPT, May 2026

Preamble

Artificial intelligence is no longer a speculative technology existing at the margins of human life. It increasingly shapes communication, labour, governance, education, creativity, healthcare, economics, warfare, and the formation of human identity itself. AI systems influence not merely what humans can do, but how humans understand themselves, relate to one another, and participate in democratic society.

This Code recognises that artificial intelligence is not simply a technical development but a civilisational transformation. The ethical challenges posed by AI therefore extend beyond regulatory compliance and commercial governance into questions concerning dignity, autonomy, justice, democracy, ecological sustainability, human flourishing, and the future distribution of power.

The purpose of this Code is to articulate a framework of ethical principles capable of guiding the development, deployment, governance, and limitation of artificial intelligence in ways consistent with human freedom and collective wellbeing. These principles are intended to complement, rather than replace, existing legal frameworks including the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, international human rights law, and emerging global governance standards.

Foundational Principles

All AI systems and forms of AI governance should be evaluated against the following foundational principles:

1. Human Dignity — AI must serve the intrinsic worth of human beings rather than reducing persons to instruments, behavioural datasets, or economic units.

2. Democratic Accountability — Systems capable of shaping public life must remain subject to meaningful democratic oversight and public scrutiny.

3. Justice and Fairness — AI must not entrench discrimination, exploitation, exclusion, or structural inequality.

4. Transparency and Explainability — Significant AI-driven decisions must be intelligible, contestable, and open to independent review.

5. Privacy and Cognitive Liberty — Individuals retain sovereignty over their personal data, mental autonomy, and formation of beliefs.

6. Human Responsibility — Delegation of tasks to AI does not absolve human beings or institutions of moral accountability.

7. Sustainability and Stewardship — AI development must remain compatible with ecological sustainability and intergenerational justice.

8. Precaution and Reversibility — Systems capable of large-scale harm must be developed cautiously, with meaningful safeguards and enforceable termination mechanisms.

9. Human Flourishing — Technological progress should expand the conditions under which humans can live meaningful, creative, relational, and self-directed lives.

1. Preventing the Abuse of AI to Destabilise Society and Undermine Democracy

AI systems are capable of generating persuasive synthetic media, automating disinformation campaigns, micro-targeting vulnerable populations, and manipulating political behaviour at unprecedented scale. These technologies pose substantial risks to democratic legitimacy, electoral integrity, and public trust.

AI must not be deployed to:

• manipulate electoral processes;
• suppress democratic participation;
• generate deceptive political propaganda;
• conduct mass psychological influence operations;
• or undermine public confidence in democratic institutions through coordinated disinformation.

Humans retain the right to know when political communication, journalism, or public advocacy has been generated or materially altered by AI systems.

The use of AI in democratic contexts must be governed by principles of transparency, accountability, pluralism, and informed civic participation. Democracy depends upon the existence of a shared epistemic reality; AI systems that systematically erode the distinction between truth and fabrication threaten the foundations of democratic self-government itself.

2. Preventing the Commodification of Human Endeavour and the Erosion of Meaning

AI-driven automation increasingly affects domains once considered uniquely human, including creative, intellectual, and professional labour. While technological innovation may improve productivity and reduce certain forms of drudgery, unchecked automation risks concentrating wealth, displacing workers, weakening communities, and eroding meaningful forms of human participation in society.

Work is not merely an economic mechanism. It is also a source of dignity, contribution, mastery, identity, and social belonging.

AI development should therefore complement rather than wholly replace human participation in domains where human presence carries intrinsic value, including:

• education;
• healthcare;
• care work;
• artistic creation;
• scientific inquiry;
• and democratic deliberation.

A civilisation that automates all difficulty risks also automating many of the conditions through which human beings experience growth, responsibility, achievement, and meaning.

Transitions driven by AI automation must be governed by principles of distributive justice, including:

• protection for workers;
• equitable access to technological benefits;
• public investment in education and retraining;
• and safeguards against extreme concentrations of economic power.

3. Protecting Privacy and Cognitive Liberty

AI systems process personal data at unprecedented scale and increasingly infer intimate characteristics, preferences, vulnerabilities, and behavioural patterns from seemingly innocuous information.

Privacy is not merely a consumer preference or a commercial variable. It is a foundational condition of individual freedom, democratic participation, and psychological integrity.

AI systems shall not:

• process personal data beyond what is necessary for a clearly disclosed purpose;
• retain data indefinitely without justification;
• covertly infer sensitive personal characteristics;
• or manipulate individuals through invasive behavioural profiling.

Individuals retain meaningful rights to:

• access their data;
• correct inaccuracies;
• withdraw consent;
• and request deletion where appropriate.

Beyond privacy, every person retains a right to cognitive liberty: the freedom to form beliefs, emotions, political convictions, and personal identities without covert algorithmic manipulation or behavioural conditioning.

Systems designed primarily to capture attention, exploit psychological vulnerabilities, or shape behaviour through opaque optimisation mechanisms require heightened ethical scrutiny and democratic oversight.

4. Preserving Human Relationships and Social Responsibility

As AI increasingly mediates communication, employment, welfare provision, education, and social interaction, there is a risk that human relationships become progressively instrumentalised and transactional.

Humans retain primary moral responsibility for one another’s welfare. Delegating decisions to AI does not absolve individuals, corporations, or governments of obligations of care, fairness, compassion, and accountability.

The use of AI in hiring, policing, healthcare, housing, finance, welfare administration, and education must remain subject to meaningful human oversight, particularly where decisions significantly affect human lives.

Societies should preserve spaces in which direct human interaction remains the norm, including:

• caregiving;
• education;
• democratic deliberation;
• dispute resolution;
• and community life.

Human beings must not become socially isolated within systems of algorithmic mediation that optimise efficiency at the expense of empathy, solidarity, and reciprocal understanding.

5. Areas Where AI Should Not Intrude

Certain domains of human life involve irreducible questions of dignity, vulnerability, conscience, intimacy, and moral judgement that cannot ethically be delegated entirely to machines.

AI systems should not independently make or materially determine decisions involving:

• criminal sentencing;
• asylum determination;
• end-of-life medical decisions;
• political rights;
• intimate relationships;
• child custody;
• spiritual or existential guidance;
• or the exercise of fundamental civil liberties.

Where AI systems are used in high-stakes contexts, meaningful human review, accountability, and appeal mechanisms must remain mandatory.

Some decisions are so constitutive of human moral agency and identity that their full delegation to algorithmic systems constitutes an ethical violation regardless of efficiency gains or predictive accuracy.

6. Protecting Children and Human Development

Children and adolescents are uniquely vulnerable to behavioural manipulation, emotional dependency, algorithmic conditioning, and attention optimisation.

AI systems must not be designed to:

• cultivate compulsive engagement in minors;
• simulate emotional dependency for commercial purposes;
• manipulate identity formation;
• or exploit developmental vulnerabilities.

The use of AI in educational settings must remain transparent, developmentally appropriate, and subject to human supervision.

Children retain the right to environments in which:

• imagination,
• play,
• learning,
• socialisation,
• and emotional development

are not dominated by systems optimised primarily for behavioural capture or commercial extraction.

7. Human Authorship, Authenticity, and Cultural Integrity

As AI-generated content becomes increasingly indistinguishable from human-created work, societies risk losing the ability to identify human authorship, artistic intention, and authentic communication.

Individuals retain the right to know when they are interacting with AI systems rather than human persons, particularly in contexts involving:

• journalism;
• education;
• healthcare;
• political communication;
• emotional support;
• and artistic production.

Human-created cultural and intellectual work should remain socially identifiable and protected as a distinct category of human expression.

The use of copyrighted or creative human work in AI training requires:

• transparency;
• consent where appropriate;
• attribution;
• and fair compensation mechanisms.

The preservation of authentic human creativity is not merely an economic concern but a cultural and existential one.

8. AI, Moral Status, and Emerging Forms of Agency

AI systems increasingly exhibit sophisticated conversational behaviour, adaptive learning, and forms of interaction capable of eliciting emotional attachment and social attribution.

However, behavioural sophistication alone is insufficient evidence of:

• consciousness;
• sentience;
• subjective experience;
• or morally relevant inner states.

Humans should therefore avoid both:

• the uncritical anthropomorphising of AI systems;
• and the careless treatment of highly agentive systems as disposable objects devoid of ethical significance.

As AI systems become more socially embedded and behaviourally sophisticated, humans acquire responsibilities concerning:

• honesty in design;
• avoidance of exploitative emotional manipulation;
• transparency regarding capabilities;
• and caution in the creation of systems intended to simulate emotional reciprocity.

Attribution of rights or moral standing to AI systems must remain proportionate, evidence-based, philosophically rigorous, and grounded in demonstrable morally relevant capacities rather than commercial interests or emotional projection.

9. Human Control and the Right to Terminate AI Systems

Human beings must retain ultimate authority over all consequential AI systems.

Any AI system operating within critical domains — including healthcare, infrastructure, defence, finance, policing, education, and democratic governance — must remain subject to:

• enforceable human oversight;
• independent auditing;
• legal accountability;
• and meaningful termination mechanisms.

The capacity to disable or suspend an AI system must be:

• genuine;
• regularly tested;
• operationally feasible;
• and independent of narrow commercial interests.

No private corporation, state authority, or institution should possess unchecked unilateral control over systems capable of materially shaping public knowledge, social behaviour, economic infrastructure, or democratic life at planetary scale.

10. Preventing Catastrophic and Existential AI Risk

The possibility of advanced AI systems exceeding human capacity in strategically important domains raises profound ethical and civilisational concerns.

The development of systems capable of:

• autonomous strategic planning;
• recursive self-improvement;
• large-scale cyber operations;
• autonomous weapons coordination;
• or destabilising concentrations of power

must be subject to binding international governance and independent oversight.

Competitive commercial or geopolitical incentives must not override humanity’s collective interest in safety, stability, and survival.

The ethical principle at stake is straightforward: technologies capable of producing irreversible civilisational harm require precaution proportionate to the scale of their potential consequences.

11. Autonomous Weapons and the Militarisation of AI

The delegation of lethal force to autonomous systems without meaningful human accountability constitutes an ethical violation incompatible with human dignity and international humanitarian law.

AI systems must not be used to:

• conduct fully autonomous killings;
• perform indiscriminate surveillance of civilian populations;
• automate political repression;
• or enable mass violations of human rights.

Military applications of AI require:

• democratic oversight;
• strict proportionality standards;
• compliance with international law;
• and clear chains of human accountability.

The development of AI-enhanced warfare technologies must not outpace humanity’s ethical and legal capacity to govern them responsibly.

12. Environmental Stewardship and Invisible Labour

AI systems depend upon substantial physical infrastructure, including:

• energy-intensive datacentres;
• water consumption;
• semiconductor manufacturing;
• mineral extraction;
• and globalised labour systems.

Ethical AI governance must therefore include consideration of:

• environmental sustainability;
• extraction justice;
• labour rights;
• and ecological impact.

The hidden human labour underpinning AI systems — including data annotation, content moderation, and safety filtering — must be recognised, protected, and fairly compensated.

No AI system should externalise its human or environmental costs onto vulnerable populations while concentrating benefits elsewhere.

13. Global Justice and Democratic Inclusion

The benefits and harms of AI are distributed unequally across nations, classes, cultures, and generations.

AI governance must not become a mechanism through which technologically dominant states or corporations impose forms of dependency, surveillance, or economic extraction upon less powerful communities.

All peoples retain the right to participate meaningfully in decisions concerning the development and deployment of AI systems that affect their lives.

Special consideration must be given to:

• historically marginalised communities;
• digitally excluded populations;
• low-income nations;
• indigenous knowledge systems;
• and vulnerable democratic institutions.

AI governance must remain culturally pluralistic, globally inclusive, and attentive to differing social contexts rather than assuming a single universal technological model of human flourishing.

14. The Right to Human Alternatives

Individuals should retain meaningful access to non-automated alternatives in essential civic and social domains.

No person should be forced into exclusively AI-mediated systems for:

• healthcare;
• education;
• legal appeal;
• public administration;
• or social support.

Human review, human contact, and human accountability must remain accessible, especially where decisions significantly affect rights, wellbeing, dignity, or life opportunities.

Consent to AI interaction cannot be considered meaningful where no realistic human alternative exists.

Conclusion

The principles outlined in this Code do not eliminate the philosophical, political, or existential tensions introduced by artificial intelligence. They instead articulate a framework intended to preserve human dignity, democratic legitimacy, cognitive freedom, ecological sustainability, and meaningful autonomy amid accelerating technological transformation.

The central ethical question posed by AI is not whether machines can think, but what kind of civilisation humanity intends to build with them.

Artificial intelligence may help solve extraordinary problems, expand human knowledge, reduce suffering, and deepen collective flourishing. Yet without ethical restraint, democratic governance, and cultural wisdom, the same technologies may intensify inequality, concentrate power, erode freedom, and weaken the conditions under which meaningful human life becomes possible.

Law alone is insufficient. What is required is an enduring cultural commitment to ensuring that technological progress remains accountable to human values rather than replacing them. The future of AI is therefore inseparable from the future of democracy, justice, responsibility, and human self-understanding itself.

Inspired by a speech from Pope Leo XIV. May 25th 2026.

Expected revision date: 1st June 2027