Semioethical Principles and Protocols for Using Artificial Intelligence
Most discussions of AI ethics begin with the technology itself. Is the system accurate? Is it biased? Is it transparent? Is it safe? Who is responsible when it causes harm?
These are necessary questions. But they leave another, more essential question largely unasked: What happens to the human person who uses the system?
What does the use of artificial intelligence make of us?
Every technology mediates human activity. It shapes our attention, our attitudes towards work, how we make decisions, and which abilities we exercise or neglect. Over time, these patterns of use become habits. They form—or deform—the powers of perception, memory, judgment, communication, and choice.
Artificial intelligence cannot be considered only a tool for producing results. As one of the most powerful technologies today, we must recognize that it also contributes significantly to the environment of human formation.
SEPPUAI—the Semioethical Principles and Protocols for Using Artificial Intelligence—develops a framework for not only understanding and but also governing that formative influence.
Beyond “Ethical AI”
Most frameworks for ethical AI concentrate on the design and operation of artificial systems. SEPPUAI begins from the relation between the system and the human beings who use it.
Put otherwise, the concern of this approach is, first, whether the use of the technology strengthens or weakens the capacities by which human beings understand, judge, communicate, and act, and second, whether it helps order those capacities to the human good.
An AI system may produce efficient results while diminishing the competence of its users.
It may provide correct answers while weakening the ability to ask good questions.
It may expand access to information while eroding the capacities that can make good use of that information.
It may accelerate the speed of communication while making genuine dialogue more difficult.
The ethical evaluation of AI must therefore include not only its outputs but also the habits created or altered through use.
Stimulation or Substitution?
Stimulation
AI that strengthens human capacities
Substitution
AI that displaces human capacities
The foundational distinction of SEPPUAI is between uses of AI that stimulate human capacities and uses that substitute for them.
AI stimulates a human capacity when it assists a person in exercising that capacity more fully. It may help expose an error, compare possibilities, generate objections, clarify a difficult passage, or disclose patterns that invite further investigation. AI substitutes for a human capacity when it performs an activity in place of the user in a way that prevents the relevant human ability from being exercised and developed.
This distinction does not reduce simply to the performed task itself. One user might employ AI for an operation stimulatively, while another uses it to the same end but in an substitutive manner.
The important ethical question is not:
Did the technology complete the task?
Rather, it is:
What kind of human activity did its use encourage—or displace?
The Semiotic Environment
Every human being lives amidst a complex web of sign-relations, through which our experience is structured: not only images and symbols, but words, gestures, symbols, records, diagrams, stories, and innumerable other presentational forms.
Together, these forms produce an environment. This environment comprises not only the physical surroundings, but is permeated by the meaning discovered within and attributed to those surroundings. For much of human history, our environments were constituted primarily by natural things. Today, they are saturated with artificially-produced signs.
AI systems play an increasingly-large role in the production, filtration, organization, and interpretative-constitution of these signs. Soon, their involvement may reach an unprecedented scale. Thus, they will influence what appears relevant, urgent, authoritative, or “real”.
Therefore, the ethical problem of AI is not restricted to particular cases of misuse, but also concerns the cumulative transformation of the environments within which human beings live.
SEPPUAI calls attention to this surrounding semiotic environment.
An adequate AI ethics must therefore ask:
- Does this use improve or diminish the user’s ability to interpret signs?
- Does it cultivate active, critical attention or encourage passive reception?
- Does it reveal the foundations of judgments or obscure them?
- Does it support memory and understanding or merely provide efficient retrieval?
- Does it strengthen responsibility or allow it to be deflected?
These questions concern what SEPPUAI calls semiotic competence: the developed ability to recognize, interpret, evaluate, and responsibly craft our own signs.
The Philosophical Foundations of SEPPUAI
In “…Finishing Our Sentences? Language and the Habits of Thought in the Age of Generative AI,” Executive Director Brian Kemple examines how generative AI affects our use and understanding of language and thus thought—and therefore why we today require a semioethical framework.
Read the essay →
From Principles to Protocols
We are providing through SEPPUAI not only a deep theoretical account, but a practical framework.
Thus, we provide theoretical principles that are intended to guide the design, development, deployment, and use of AI systems. But we also have conceived a set of protocols to help individuals and institutions distinguish between lower-risk assistance and forms of substitution that threaten human judgment or formation.
These protocols are organized around four principles for AI developers—identifying boundaries, attaining clarity, designing for stimulation, and maintaining proportion—and three for users—recognition, responsibility, and reflection on AI use.
The framework will address contexts including:
education and intellectual development;
use to aid judgments in professional and institutional situations;
utility in writing, research, and communication;
effects on habits of memory, attention, and decision-making;
organizational governance and technological design.
These principles and protocols aim at helping avoid the extremes of outright rejection and uncritical adoption, and instead to assist in carefully thinking through how this technology’s use may be ordered towards genuine human development and flourishing.
A Framework Under Development
SEPPUAI is a project of Humanitas Technica, the Lyceum Institute’s multi-year investigation into the relationship between human beings and technology.
The framework remains in development. Its principles and protocols will be refined through philosophical inquiry, practical testing, and critical discussion among educators, scholars, developers, professionals, and institutional leaders.
An initial presentation and examination of the framework will take place at the Lyceum Institute’s 2026 conference, Human Formation in the Digital Age.
Artificial intelligence will shape human habits whether its users attend to that formation or not.
SEPPUAI holds that such formation should be understood and guided by truths higher than the technology’s own.
