Journal of responsible technology最新文献

{"title":"AI in professional services: Power, perceptions and tension","authors":"Carl Bezuidenhout ,&nbsp;Michael Mehmet ,&nbsp;Roba Abbas ,&nbsp;Troy Heffernan","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100172","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100172","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Professional judgment in law and accounting is no longer the sole domain of humans. Algorithms, particularly those powered by generative AI that mimic expertise, are reshaping the foundations of professional work. Motivations are clear: speed, higher margins, scalable services, and improved client satisfaction. Yet the real contest is over meaning, and whether professional services delivered through Artificial Intelligence (AI) can achieve the same responsible and trusted value as expertise delivered by humans.</div><div>How AI is understood, and by whom, will shape this trajectory. Like other technologies, its meaning is fluid, anchored in multiple interpretations of its role in society. For regulated professional services firms (PSFs), this means AI’s trajectory is not predetermined, with material consequences for how responsibility, trust, expertise, and professional value are defined.</div><div>This study adopts netnography to analyse a longitudinal dataset of ∼8000 social media posts. Guided by the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory, narratives regarding the use of AI in PSFs are examined. The analysis reveals how meaning and perception have shifted, influenced by the unique priorities of professionals, clients, academics, industry regulators, technology developers, and the media.</div><div>The findings show a fractured debate. Commercial voices promote automation, scale, and innovation, while academics, clients, and regulators emphasise governance and ethics but remain less visible. As a result, what AI means in PSFs is being influenced by those with the greatest voice, not those with the greatest accountability. At the centre is a structural tension, where AI enables advice to be produced anywhere, yet responsibility cannot be displaced. In this sense, AI breaks the link between the production and professional accountability of advice. No stabilised understanding of AI’s role in PSFs has emerged. Ongoing contestation leaves firms without closure on how professional value, responsibility, and trust should be defined.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148177748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between ancestors and algorithms: ritual responsibility as a culturally sensitive framework for responsible innovation in DeathTech","authors":"Alessia Maccaro ,&nbsp;Camilla Audia ,&nbsp;Atsou Afaniyzou ,&nbsp;Gothier Daheou ,&nbsp;Esther Cadja Dodo ,&nbsp;Eugenio Zito","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100175","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100175","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the ethical, cultural, and political implications of DeathTech—digital afterlife technologies such as memorial platforms, chatbots of the deceased, voice clones and AI-generated avatars—arguing that existing frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) are insufficient when applied to symbolically charged domains such as death and mourning. While current debates often focus on fairness, accountability, privacy and transparency, these procedural tools overlook the ritual, communal and intercultural dimensions through which societies generate meaning around death. Drawing on philosophical analysis, comparative ethics, anthropological literature and empirical fieldwork conducted in Benin, the article introduces the concept of ritual responsibility. This notion captures the ethical obligation to respect and sustain the symbolic boundaries and collective practices that regulate mourning, remembrance and the transition from the status of the deceased to that of an ancestor.</div><div>Beninese Vodun traditions provide a particularly illuminating case study because they articulate death not as an individual event but as a socially mediated transformation enacted through structured rituals, collective responsibility and the mediation of ritual specialists. These practices reveal the limits of universalised governance models and show how mourning can become ethically and psychosocially fragile when severed from communal frameworks. By bringing these insights into dialogue with current digital afterlife technologies, including griefbots, memorialisation platforms and postmortem avatars, the article proposes a ritual-sensitive reconfiguration of RRI.</div><div>The article reinterprets anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness through ritual responsibility and translates this reconstruction into practical governance and design recommendations, including grief impact assessments, collective consent, culturally meaningful temporal limits, interpretability for bereaved users, and accountability metrics oriented toward dignity, community cohesion and symbolic non-harm. It argues that digital afterlife technologies must be designed and regulated not only as technical artefacts but as moral infrastructures capable of reshaping values, relations and collective memory.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148230720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Responsibly adopting workplace mental well-being platforms","authors":"Emma Gentry,&nbsp;Elvira Perez Vallejos,&nbsp;Chris Greenhalgh,&nbsp;Liz Dowthwaite,&nbsp;Vincent Bryce","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100168","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100168","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Employers are increasingly drawn to technology-based solutions to assist employees with their psychological well-being and overall functioning. Yet, employees have some concerns around these technologies, which require further attention, and which may be fundamental to their sustainability in the long-term. To understand how organisations might responsibly deploy ‘off the shelf’ wellbeing solutions, we conducted a series of expert workshops and interviews with union representatives, employees, and organisational representatives in a higher education setting. The final roadmap to platform deployment comprised three stages: (1) foundational concerns pre-deployment and assessing the motivation for a technology-based route, (2) platform-related concerns and assessing the motivation for data-sharing, and (3) data-sharing concerns and sustainability. Most importantly, employees could envision greater acceptability of such tools with a degree of organisational responsiveness to their concerns, which may improve the quality of their engagements over time, and which might spark a curiosity to explore digital offerings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148177749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A UK perspective on responsible education for responsible AI: a multidisciplinary review and evaluation framework","authors":"Maira Klyshbekova ,&nbsp;Gisela Reyes Cruz ,&nbsp;Caitlin Bentley ,&nbsp;Stef Garasto ,&nbsp;Amy Aisha Brown ,&nbsp;Christine Aicardi ,&nbsp;Brian Ball ,&nbsp;Mohammad Naiseh ,&nbsp;Oana Andrei","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2025.100147","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2025.100147","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) education has emerged as a way of approaching the field of AI to address a host of concerns (Bentley et al., 2023). Many education providers have been releasing new RAI-related online courses, programmes, or toolkits. When combined with the issues emerging from the development, deployment, and use of AI, the expansion of RAI education and the proliferation of resources raise two critical questions. First, what can we learn about RAI from examining both the content and structure of publicly available RAI educational resources? Second, how might we understand the quality and impact of these RAI resources? We conducted a systematic search of UK RAI educational resources found online. We first present a descriptive analysis of 211 resources collected, including their type, format, cost, sector, audience, and type of provider. Furthermore, we describe our collaborative approach to analysing four pre-selected resources in-depth, from which we outlined an evaluation framework that we then employed for assessing the content of a subset of 47 resources. The five crucial areas of our framework could guide both learners and developers when approaching RAI resources.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145885820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Responsible design and use of social media technology: A reflective case study on raising awareness towards social sustainability","authors":"Christodoulos Christodoulou ,&nbsp;Arild Skarsfjord Berg","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100158","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100158","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This reflective case study examines how the responsible use of social media can help raise awareness of electoral participation among immigrants in Norway. Through a structured, four-phase design process, the project combined semi-structured interviews, workshops with political representatives, and design probes as a new method to investigate barriers to participation and to test communication strategies. Findings revealed that the primary challenge was not the lack of information, but rather the ineffective distribution and visibility of existing resources. The project highlights the role of researchers and designers as facilitators of access, emphasising that responsible social media use requires careful attention to who is reached, how messages are interpreted, and what barriers remain. It also emphasises the need for participatory, community-driven approaches and the importance of integrating offline channels to reach diverse audiences. The reflections of the case study offer deeper insights into the ethical and strategic responsibilities of social media design that can be transferable to other cases in civic communication.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147396637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An exploratory thematic review of the emerging field of RRI education","authors":"Ferdinand Griesdoorn,&nbsp;Maarten Kroesen,&nbsp;Pieter Vermaas","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100152","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100152","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This exploratory thematic review examines the emerging landscape of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) education. It reviews 17 peer-reviewed studies published over the past two decades, using the PRISMA methodology. These studies were categorized into four themes to identify recurring successes and obstacles. The review highlights several successful practices, including the contextualization of RRI, promotion of reflexivity, participatory methods, interdisciplinary collaboration, and instances of institutional integration. Simultaneously, it uncovers persistent obstacles such as conceptual ambiguity, institutional resistance, scalability limitations, and the difficulty of translating abstract RRI principles into measurable competencies. The relations between some of these obstacles suggests a vicious reinforcing cycle that hinders progress in RRI education. We argue that resolving conceptual and definitional ambiguities could foster a more coherent and sustainable RRI education.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146078713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards interpretable models for language proficiency assessment: Predicting the CEFR level of Estonian learner texts","authors":"Kais Allkivi","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100162","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100162","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using NLP to analyze authentic learner language helps to build automated assessment and feedback tools. It also offers new and extensive insights into the development of second language production. However, there is a lack of research explicitly combining these aspects. This study aimed to classify Estonian proficiency examination writings (levels A2–C1), assuming that careful feature selection can lead to more explainable and generalizable machine learning models for language testing. Various linguistic properties of the training data were analyzed to identify relevant proficiency predictors associated with increasing complexity and correctness, rather than the writing task. Such lexical, morphological, surface, and error features were used to train classification models, which were compared to models that also allowed for other features. The pre-selected features yielded a similar test accuracy but reduced variation in the classification of different text types. The best classifiers achieved an accuracy of around 0.9. Additional evaluation on an earlier exam sample revealed that the writings have become more complex over a 7–10-year period, while accuracy still reached 0.8 with some feature sets. The results have been implemented in the writing evaluation module of an Estonian open-source language learning environment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147396636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Datafication of mourning: Emotional labour, memory politics, and ethical innovation in digital grief technologies","authors":"Abhishek Thommandru ,&nbsp;Varda Mone","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100159","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100159","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores how digital technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain archives, and platform-specific memorial systems change the grieving phenomenon. It examines how datafication processes, which transform emotional labour into content that is managed by algorithms, also redefine grief expression and remembrance and bring up ethical issues of commodification, privacy and consent. The discussion points out the historical continuities of mediated grief and how the traditional memorial artefacts were replaced by interactive digital settings and deals with the psychosocial consequences of long-term digital interaction with grieving. The most significant ones are ownership and control of digital legacies, being biased by an algorithm, the nature of representation and visibility, and the political aspects of collective mourning on the Internet. Relying on the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), the work promotes the use of interdisciplinary methods in attaching human-centred design, ethics, sociocultural understanding, and legal changes to prevent the exploitation and inequality of digital afterlife technologies by applying humanistic, ethical, sociocultural and legal values and concerns.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147396639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Never say goodbye: assumptions of ‘normal’ grief in framings and portrayals of AI grief technologies","authors":"Pascalle Paumen ,&nbsp;Katleen Gabriels","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100149","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100149","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Artificial Intelligence (AI) based grief technologies are being offered as solutions to grief: AI griefbots are trained on the departed’s or dying person’s digital footprints to simulate them. Ongoing research questions whether they help or hinder ‘healthy’ grieving, neglecting underlying assumptions about ‘normal’ grieving. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, this article analyses AI grief technology framings and portrayals in documentaries and six services’ websites (<em>Seance AI; Eternos; You, Only Virtual; HereAfter AI; Project December; re;memory).</em> We demonstrate AI grief technologies’ contribution to renegotiating grief as a technical problem to be solved. The techno-solutions are rooted in existing psychological discourses of ‘normal’ grief and position AI as band-aids or cures for grief and death. Documentaries on AI grief technologies play a significant part in reinforcing boundary-setting between normality and abnormality. Grief shifts from a human experience to something that can and should be made more efficient or avoided altogether through AI.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145927356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Multi-stakeholder perspectives on governing innovation in the digital afterlife","authors":"Khadiza Laskor ,&nbsp;Richard Owen ,&nbsp;Andrew Charlesworth","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100150","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100150","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Innovations regarding the digital afterlife, underpinned by rapid advances in generative AI and synthetic media, potentiate the creation of interactive, posthumous personas – digital re-creations – based on the digital remains of the dead. Current regulations do not extend to these, resulting in a governance void. We present findings from 69 stakeholder interviews that explored whether such re-creations should be governed and, if so, how. Our respondents exhibited a widespread view that governance was necessary and proposed several governance options, although there was little consensus as to which of these should be taken forward. Stakeholders acknowledged the various motivations and purposes of digital re-creations, which governance should be sensitive to. Our findings suggest governance principles that include proportionality (in relation to purpose and use), dignity (of the deceased) and protection from harm for those interacting with digital re-creations, particularly for the vulnerable, e.g. minors and those who may be grieving. Given the nascent stage of these innovations, initiatives aimed at developing a common understanding of terms (such as the digital afterlife), education and awareness programmes, and convening broadly configured, policy-oriented governance working groups are important first steps towards responsible development.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145977983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}