Trust by Design: The Law and Ethics of a Digital Professor 

The biggest ethical risk of our project is not a wrong fact. It is a convincing face saying it. An avatar with a real professor’s voice makes errors, bias and over-reliance more persuasive. That is why Part 5 of our Investigate report — the legal, ethical and market study by Youssef — matters as much as the technology.

Six rules that shape the solution

1. Always say it is an AI. Since August 2026, the EU AI Act (Article 50) requires that users know they are talking to a machine, and that synthetic voices and faces be labelled.

2. Never read the student’s face. Emotion recognition is banned in education since February 2025 (AI Act, Article 5). Our mentor will detect confusion from the conversation — messages, hesitations, repeated questions — never from a webcam.

3. A face and a voice are biometric data. Cloning a professor needs explicit, separate consent, a liveness check and the right to withdraw at any time.

4. Student data stays protected. In Tunisia, sending student or professor data to a foreign provider requires an authorisation from the INPDP.

5. Protect minors. An age gate and parental consent wherever minors are concerned.

6. A human stays responsible. Every mentor has a named owner — the professor or a curator — who reviews its content and answers the questions it should not.

What the evidence says about trust

Only 46% of people say they trust AI. In one survey, 62% of computing students said they would not trust AI-presented videos as much as recorded ones. And in our own testing, an avatar using Albert Einstein’s face was created on a commercial platform without a single authorisation step.

Our difference

Talking avatars are already sold by the minute. What does not exist yet is the educational layer on top: an avatar of the student’s own professor, grounded in their course, transparent about being an AI, built on consent — with the real professor able to step in.

Avatars extend teachers. They never replace them.

Read the full constraints in the Investigate tab of our CBL journey.