Al Literacy + Ethics Literacy = Human Advocacy
The gold standard for responsible Al
Neither competency alone is sufficient. One without the other is not credible.
The model holds a single, demanding idea. To practice responsible AI in any industry, profession, or organization, both AI literacy and ethics literacy must be present. It is a practical model for keeping people, and the trust organizations have built with them, at the center as AI is adopted.
WHAT THE MODEL MEANS
Most conversations about AI treat technical skill and ethics as separate tracks. AELHA treats them as inseparable. Knowing the tools without the ethics leads to efficient harm: fast, fluent, and pointed in the wrong direction. Holding firm on ethical grounds without understanding the tools leaves a credibility gap, and leaves you unable to counsel the decisions in front of you. Responsible AI lives in the space where the two meet.
AELHA names that space. AI literacy is the functional knowledge of what AI tools can and cannot do, their capabilities, limits, appropriate uses, and governance requirements. Ethics literacy is the capacity to reason from professional values and apply them to AI-mediated decisions in defense of truth, dignity, and the public interest.
Held together, they produce human advocacy: the ability to advocate not only for an organization and its publics, but for humanity as the emergent public of the AI age. Human advocacy is the mechanism by which trust survives the transition to AI. When people remain at the center of the decision, the trust an organization has earned is protected rather than spent.
How it works in practice
AELHA OPERATES ACROSS THREE DIMENSIONS
Responsible AI is rarely undone by bad intentions. It is undone by structural conditions: who has the tools, who sets the rules, and what the wider environment permits. AELHA maps those conditions across three levels so organizations can see where their own gaps actually sit.
01. Individual: The practitioner
Disparities in AI literacy, access to training, and exposure to professional communities. The most advanced practitioners are usually not the most curious; they are the ones placed in environments that gave them tools, resources, and peers.
02. Organizational: The institution
The gap between a practitioner’s readiness to adopt AI responsibly and the organization’s capacity to enable and govern it. Where governance is absent, people improvise their own ethics case by case, which is neither sustainable nor fair.
03. Societal: The wider field
The regulatory, economic, and infrastructural conditions that decide whether the profession as a whole can adopt AI equitably. When guardrails are thin and tools commercialize fast, the resources for responsible adoption end up unevenly distributed.
The scholarship behind AELHA
BUILT ON ESTABLISHED THEORY, GROUNDED IN ORIGINAL RESEARCH
AELHA did not arrive as an abstraction. It was developed through doctoral research using constructivist grounded theory, and its foundations draw on three established traditions in communication and ethics scholarship. The theory supplied the lenses; the research gave the framework its form.
As the research (Germinder, 2026) concludes, AELHA is the synthesis of established theory and the study’s findings. It is what the data, at its most articulate, was already saying.
Germinder, L. (2026). Constructing responsible AI in public relations: Perspectives on ethical adoption from generative AI to agentic systems [Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri].
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
AELHA, the AI-Ethics Literacy Model for Human Advocacy, is a framework for responsible AI. It holds that adopting AI responsibly requires two competencies developed together: AI literacy and ethics literacy. Their combination produces human advocacy, the ability to advocate for the people affected by AI-driven decisions, not only for an organization and its publics. The model is expressed as AI Literacy + Ethics Literacy = Human Advocacy.
AELHA was created by Lea-Ann Germinder, PhD, APR, Fellow PRSA, as the original contribution of her doctoral research at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Germinder is a practitioner-scholar with 46 years in public relations and the founder of Germinder & Associates.
AI literacy is the functional knowledge of what AI tools can and cannot do, including their capabilities, limits, appropriate uses, and governance requirements. Ethics literacy is the capacity to reason from professional values and apply them to AI-mediated decisions. AELHA holds that neither is sufficient alone. AI literacy without ethics leads to efficient harm; ethics without AI literacy leaves a practitioner unable to guide the decisions in front of them. One without the other is not credible.
Most AI ethics guidelines state values an organization should hold. AELHA addresses how those values are actually practiced. It pairs ethical reasoning with the technical understanding required to apply it, and it maps the conditions for responsible adoption across three levels: the individual, the organization, and society. The goal is not a statement of principles but a usable approach to keeping people at the center as AI is adopted.
AELHA operates across three interdependent dimensions. The individual dimension concerns a practitioner’s own AI and ethics literacy and access to training. The organizational dimension concerns whether an organization can enable and govern responsible AI use. The societal dimension concerns the regulatory, economic, and infrastructural conditions that shape whether responsible adoption is possible at all. Mapping these together shows organizations where their real gaps sit.
Both, in two related but distinct iterations. AELHA was developed and defended as a contribution to public relations theory, and it continues as an academic model through scholarly presentations and further study. In parallel, it is offered in a commercial format that Germinder & Associates applies in client engagements across any sector. The research establishes the model; the practice puts it to work.
No. Germinder & Associates is, first and always, a strategic communications firm offering the full range of brand, product, reputation, and media counsel. That work is now informed by doctoral-level expertise in responsible AI, but you do not have to be focused on AI to work with the firm. The AELHA framework is available to organizations that want it.
AELHA stands for the AI-Ethics Literacy Model for Human Advocacy. It is pronounced ah-LEE-ha.
Yes. AELHA was developed through doctoral research using constructivist grounded theory, and its foundations draw on three established traditions in communication and ethics scholarship: diffusion of innovations, deontological ethics, and responsible advocacy. The full treatment is set out in the AELHA white paper and in Germinder’s dissertation.