Interaction designers have a core ethical responsibility to protect users from manipulation and unintended consequences, especially as AI systems become embedded in everyday interfaces. One key duty is to maintain transparency. Users should be able to clearly understand when they are interacting with AI, what the system is doing and why certain outputs or recommendations appear. For example, a mental-health chatbot must explicitly state that it is not a licensed therapist and explain how it generates responses to avoid creating false trust or emotional dependency.
Interaction designers also have the ethical responsibility to maintain bias mitigation and accessibility. AI-powered voice assistances, recommendation systems and adaptive interfaces must be designed to work for users with disabilities, different languages and varying levels of digital literacy. For example, a facial recognition check-in system that fails to recognize darker skin tones or people with facial differences is an ethical failure rooted in design decisions about datasets, testing, and deployment contexts.
Finally, Interaction designers are responsible for shaping user behavior and power dynamics. AI systems are persuasive by nature as its recommender engines directly influence emotion and decision-making, thus designers must avoid optimizing purely for engagement at the cost of the user’s well-being. In this way, ethical interaction design requires constant negotiation between technological capability, business incentives and the long-term psychological and social impact on real human lives.