Why We Hyphenated AI-Ethicist

AI-Ethicist.org uses the hyphen intentionally. It is not stylistic, nor decorative, nor a branding flourish. The hyphen is doing conceptual work.

In established disciplines, compounds fuse naturally — bioethics, neuroethics, data ethics. Hyphens tend to disappear only after the field has reached a point of disciplinary maturity. But AI-Ethics has not yet arrived at such a point, and we believe it would be premature (and misleading) to signal that it has.

The truth is simple:
AI-Ethics is still in its infancy because the field has never meaningfully integrated UX Research.

For decades, “AI Ethics” has been framed almost exclusively through philosophy, policy, and abstract principles. These are valuable foundations — but they are not the places where real human harms emerge. UX Researchers are the ones who observe user behavior, document friction, analyze unintended consequences, and confront the gap between technical intention and lived experience. UX is where the ethics actually materialize.

And yet, the discipline that makes intelligence legible — that reveals what humans actually need, understand, and experience — has been structurally absent from the field that claims to govern those intelligences.

Nothing in AI-Ethics has matured without us.
Not alignment.
Not safety.
Not fairness.
Not the rhetoric of “transparency” or “trust.”
Not the user-in-the-loop systems that ethical deployment depends on.

Until UX Research is recognized not as an add-on but as a constitutive part of the discipline, we reject the idea that “AI Ethics” is a finished or stable field. The hyphen marks this stance.

The Hyphen as a Semiotic Signal

The hyphen in AI-Ethicist performs three key functions:

It signals fusion.
This is not ethics applied to AI; it is an interdependent field formed by the interaction of human cognition, machine behavior, and design.
It marks the discipline as under construction.
Like socio-economic or bio-medical in their early stages, the hyphen shows that the field is in formation — not settled, not disciplinarily crystallized, not yet canonical.
It acknowledges the missing piece.
Until UX Research is embedded at the level of first principles, the field lacks the empirical grounding necessary for ethical claims about intelligence, autonomy, safety, or agency.

The hyphen is therefore a statement of intellectual honesty.
It reflects a genuine assessment of where the field stands.

The Future Without the Hyphen

One day, the hyphen may be dropped — not because the concept has weakened, but because the discipline has matured. When empirical human understanding, user-in-the-loop design, and real-world observation are recognized as the heart of AI Ethics, the hyphen will no longer be needed as a corrective.

But today, we use it as a boundary marker.
A conceptual insistence.
A refusal to pretend the field is further along than it is.

AI-Ethicist.org hyphenates because we are building the missing architecture.

Until UX Research is foundational to AI-Ethics, the field stays hyphenated.