Most legal professionals working in technology regulation have encountered "Ethics by Design" (EbD) as a concept. Fewer have seen it applied in a way that actually engages the public. A chapter from Generative AI, Contracts, Law and Design (Springer, 2025) presents one of the more interesting practical implementations I have come across: using AI-generated science fiction comics to run structured public deliberations on bioethical dilemmas.
The approach comes from a series of "Dine-and-Draw" events in South Africa, where participants discussed the ethical implications of emerging biotechnologies over dinner, then drew or wrote their own speculative endings to open-ended comic narratives. The method sits at the intersection of several regulatory concerns that matter to practitioners in the DACH region: public engagement requirements under emerging AI governance frameworks, the operationalization of Ethics by Design, and the challenge of making complex regulatory concepts accessible to non-specialists.
From Privacy by Design to Ethics by Design
The chapter draws an explicit parallel between Privacy by Design (PbD) under GDPR Article 25 and Ethics by Design. The comparison is instructive for practitioners.
PbD is well-understood in DACH legal practice. Swiss firms have been implementing it since the nFADP came into force in September 2023, and German firms have lived with GDPR Article 25 since 2018. The core idea — embedding privacy protections into system architecture from the outset rather than bolting them on afterward — is now standard practice.
EbD extends this logic beyond data protection to the full range of ethical considerations: fairness, inclusivity, accountability, transparency, and sustainability. Where PbD asks "is this system designed to protect personal data?", EbD asks "is this system designed to align with societal values?"
The regulatory relevance is growing. The EU AI Act explicitly requires conformity assessments, risk management systems, and human oversight mechanisms for high-risk AI systems. These are structural requirements that map directly onto EbD principles. Swiss firms advising clients on EU AI Act compliance — which is most firms serving EU-resident clients — need to understand EbD not as an academic concept but as a practical compliance methodology.
Why Comics? The Case for Speculative Storytelling
The research team's choice of medium is deliberate. Comics combine visual and textual narrative in a format that reduces the cognitive barrier to engaging with complex topics. The chapter cites substantial communication research showing that storytelling:
- Makes abstract ethical issues concrete and relatable
- Builds empathy by showing impacts on characters audiences care about
- Improves retention compared to data-driven presentations
- Creates safe spaces for exploring controversial positions
- Gives voice to perspectives that formal deliberation processes often exclude
The speculative fiction framing adds another layer. By setting bioethical dilemmas in a near-future context, the comics allow participants to engage with controversial issues — posthumous consent, AI personhood, exploitation of neural data — without the defensive reactions that real-world examples often trigger.
The Case Study: "The Artist" and Its Bioethical Yield
The comic used in the case study, titled "The Artist," tells a science fiction story about a renowned painter named Simon whose brain is transplanted into an AI system called Surge after his death. Surge initially replicates Simon's landscape paintings with precision, but gradually develops its own artistic identity, creating increasingly self-referential and mechanized works.
The story deliberately has no ending. Participants at the Dine-and-Draw event were invited to create utopian or dystopian conclusions, which surfaced a rich set of bioethical issues directly relevant to technology regulation:
Posthumous consent and autonomy. Simon never consented to the brain transplant procedure. This maps directly onto current debates about posthumous data rights, digital estate management, and the use of deceased individuals' biometric data — all areas where Swiss and EU law provide incomplete guidance.
AI personhood and self-determination. As Surge develops its own artistic identity, the question of whether it has rights independent of its creators becomes unavoidable. The EU AI Act does not address AI personhood, but the question is already surfacing in academic and policy discussions.
Exploitation of neural data. The extraction and commercial use of Simon's neural data raises issues that sit at the intersection of data protection law, bioethics regulation, and intellectual property. Under the nFADP, neural data would likely qualify as sensitive personal data requiring explicit consent — consent that a deceased person cannot give.
Cultural integrity and creative attribution. When Surge creates art using Simon's neural patterns, who is the author? This question has direct implications for copyright law in jurisdictions where authorship requires a human creator.
Design Thinking as an Ethics Delivery Mechanism
The chapter argues that design thinking — the iterative process of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — provides the operational framework for implementing EbD. This is not an abstract claim. The comic creation process itself demonstrates each phase:
Empathize: Understanding how non-specialists perceive bioethical issues. Define: Identifying the specific ethical dilemmas that need public deliberation. Ideate: Using AI image generators to rapidly produce visual scenarios. Prototype: Creating the comic as a testable engagement tool. Test: Running the Dine-and-Draw events and collecting participant responses.
For legal professionals advising technology companies on EbD compliance, this framework offers a concrete methodology. Rather than treating EbD as a checklist exercise, design thinking provides an iterative process that generates genuine stakeholder input — the kind of input that regulators increasingly expect to see in conformity assessments and ethical impact assessments.
Practical Challenges of AI-Generated Visual Content
The author is candid about the limitations of using AI image generators (in this case, Freepik) for comic creation. The challenges have direct relevance to anyone advising on AI-generated content:
Visual consistency. AI-generated images vary in style across panels, creating coherence problems. Character appearance, lighting, and artistic style can shift unpredictably between prompts.
Creative control. Getting specific emotional expressions, poses, or narrative beats from text prompts requires extensive iteration. The author describes receiving a comically inappropriate image when requesting a solemn funeral scene — the AI generated a corpse posing on top of a coffin rather than lying inside it.
Copyright exposure. AI-generated images may incorporate elements from copyrighted training data. For materials used in public engagement, this creates potential liability that needs assessment under applicable copyright frameworks.
Impact on creative professionals. Using AI to replace human illustrators raises the same labor displacement questions that the comics themselves are designed to facilitate discussion about — an irony the chapter acknowledges.
1
Human designer involved
Layout and poster formatting only
0
Human illustrators
All visual content AI-generated via Freepik
A1
Poster format
Full-color print on semi-gloss paper
What This Means for DACH Legal Practice
Three takeaways for practitioners in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria:
First, EbD is becoming operational, not just theoretical. The EU AI Act's requirements for risk management systems, ethical impact assessments, and public engagement mechanisms mean that firms advising technology clients need practical EbD methodologies. The comic-based approach described here is one model — and its low cost and scalability make it worth studying.
Second, public engagement in technology governance is moving beyond consultation papers. The shift toward interactive, co-creative formats reflects a broader trend in deliberative democracy that regulators are increasingly endorsing. Swiss firms accustomed to formal consultation processes should expect more diverse engagement requirements as AI governance frameworks mature.
Third, the bioethical issues surfaced by this method are real regulatory gaps. Posthumous consent for neural data use, AI personhood, and the exploitation of digitized human creativity are not science fiction problems. They are questions that existing regulatory frameworks — including the EU AI Act, the nFADP, and the EU Clinical Trials Regulation — do not adequately address. Firms that develop expertise in these areas now will be well-positioned as the regulatory environment evolves.
The Swiss Angle: Bioethics Governance and Public Deliberation
Switzerland occupies an unusual position in bioethics governance. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics (NEK-CNE) both have mandates that include fostering public understanding of biotechnological developments. Yet the engagement formats they use remain largely conventional: expert reports, written consultations, and occasional public hearings.
The comic-based approach described in this chapter offers a complement — not a replacement — to these formal mechanisms. It reaches audiences who would never read a NEK-CNE opinion paper. It surfaces concerns that formal consultation frameworks, with their structured questionnaires and technical language, tend to miss. And it does so at a fraction of the cost.
For Swiss firms advising biotech, pharma, or medtech clients, the practical implication is clear: Ethics by Design is not satisfied by internal compliance documentation alone. The EU AI Act's emphasis on stakeholder engagement and transparency means that demonstrable public engagement processes will increasingly be expected as part of conformity assessments. Having a method in the toolkit that actually works with lay audiences — rather than producing another stack of unread consultation responses — is a competitive advantage.
The connection to clinical trials regulation deserves particular attention. The EU Clinical Trials Regulation (536/2014) already requires informed consent processes and ethics committee review. As AI systems become more deeply embedded in clinical research — from patient selection algorithms to AI-assisted diagnostics — the boundary between medical device regulation and AI governance is blurring. Methods that facilitate public understanding of these overlapping regulatory domains will become increasingly valuable.
Looking Ahead
The research team is expanding its collaboration with the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Health Law and Ethics Research Interest Group to create comics and animations around human germline gene editing and cross-border data sharing. These are topics with direct relevance to the EU Clinical Trials Regulation, the GDPR's provisions on cross-border data transfers, and Switzerland's bilateral agreements on research cooperation.
The broader lesson is methodological. If we accept that Ethics by Design requires genuine public input — and the regulatory trend strongly suggests it does — then we need engagement formats that actually work with non-specialist audiences. AI-generated comics are one answer. They are not the only answer, but they demonstrate that accessible, low-cost, scalable public engagement on complex ethical issues is achievable. For legal professionals advising on technology governance, that is a development worth watching closely.