DM404
Applied Ethics: Trust by design in AI and Marketing
Faculty
Kenda Macdonald
CEO of Automation Ninjas
Course length
Duration
Total hours
Credits
Language
Course type
Fee for single course
Fee for degree students
Skills you’ll learn
Overview
Marketing has always had the power to influence. AI gives that power scale, speed, and precision, and the rules have not caught up. This course teaches you to think clearly about that gap.
You’ll learn what ethics actually is and how it differs from what the law happens to cover; legal and ethical are not the same thing, and the space between them is where most modern marketing operates.
You’ll study how persuasion works psychologically, where it becomes manipulation, and how to detect dark patterns in real marketing and AI systems, including AI-generated copy and algorithmic personalisation.
Then you’ll build: the final third of the course is spent designing marketing and AI frameworks that are persuasive and ethical, using trust as a design principle.
You’ll leave able to spot manipulation, prove it, argue the ethics of it, and design the better version.
Learning highlights
- Understand what ethics is and how ethical reasoning works, using major frameworks (consequences, duties, and character) as practical decision-making tools rather than philosophy trivia.
- Map the difference between what is illegal and what is unethical in marketing, covering consumer protection, data protection, advertising standards, and the emerging regulation of AI.
- Define manipulation precisely: distinguish persuasion, influence, manipulation, and coercion, and understand autonomy as the line between them.
- Detect and name dark patterns in real marketing, interfaces, and AI systems, and understand how AI amplifies manipulation risk through scale, personalisation, and optimisation.
- Design ethical marketing and AI systems, applying trust-by-design principles to build campaigns that persuade without pressuring.
- Argue the commercial case for ethical marketing: why trust compounds and manipulation borrows.
Course outline
15 classes
Session 1
Why marketing has an ethics problem. The gap between legal and ethical, and who lives in it.
Session 2
What ethics actually is: consequences, duties and character as working decision tools.
Session 3
What the law covers: consumer protection, data protection, advertising standards, and where the law stops.
Session 4
How persuasion works: the psychology of influence in twenty minutes, then the hard question of when it's fair.
Session 5
Autonomy and manipulation: precise definitions of persuasion, influence, manipulation and coercion.
Session 6
Dark patterns: taxonomy, detection and evidence.
Session 7
How AI changes the game: scale, personalisation, and optimisation loops that find manipulation on their own.
Session 8
Manipulation risk in AI-generated marketing: assessing machine-written persuasion.
Session 9
Data, profiling and consent: personalisation versus surveillance.
Session 10
Regulating AI: the AI Act, emerging frameworks, and why compliance is not ethics.
Session 11
Trust by design: principles for building ethical marketing and AI systems.
Session 12
Designing autonomy-supportive persuasion: workshop.
Session 13
The ethical audit: method, evidence, and making the commercial case. Project clinic.
Session 14
Final presentations
Session 15
Final presentations
Prerequisites
None. A broad understanding of what marketing is will suffice. The course provides its own grounding in the psychology of persuasion.
Methodology
Lectures
Case discussions and structured debate
Detection exercises on real campaigns, interfaces and AI outputs
Design workshops and project clinics
Combination of group and individual work
Final presentation
Grading
Kenda Macdonald is a forensic psychology major, a multi-award-winning founder, and the author of the bestselling Hack The Buyer Brain. She is an international keynote speaker and a doting cat mum.
Years spent building an award-winning agency around behaviour and intent led her to fuse marketing practice with psychological expertise, and to develop the behaviour-first approach that made her the UK’s leading behavioural automation expert.
See full profileApply for this course
Applied Ethics: Trust by design in AI and Marketing
by Kenda Macdonald
Total hours
45 Hours
Dates
Nov 09 - Nov 27, 2026
Fee for single course
€1500
Fee for degree students
€750
How to secure your spot
Complete the form below to kickstart your application
Schedule your Harbour.Space interview
If successful, get ready to join us on campus
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