The European Union Monday released a set of ethics guidelines for the development of trustworthy artificial intelligence.

The EU said that first, AI needs to be lawful, ethical and robust, and each of these components should align. If that doesn’t happen, society should act to change that.

“The ethical dimension of AI is not a luxury feature or an add-on,” Commission digital chief Andrus Ansip said in a statement. “It is only with trust that our society can fully benefit from technologies.”

The 41-page document said there’s now a window of opportunity to ensure that AI systems are “human-centric, resting on a commitment to their use in the service of humanity and the common good, with the goal of improving human welfare and freedom.”

Seven main factors were detailed regarding the ethics of AI development. They include AI being created to support human agency, not the other way around, that AI be developed to be reliable and not prone to making errors or vulnerable to attacks, and that citizens have control over their data and that data will not be used to harm them.

The document goes to say that the public be given full transparency as to what is being created, while AI should be developed with one thing in mind: societal and environmental change for the better. It should also be created with fairness and diversity in mind and “mechanisms should be put in place to ensure responsibility and accountability for AI systems and their outcomes.”

These guidelines, said the EU, are just preliminary, and in 2020 it will produce another report after receiving feedback from companies. Right now this is not law, but Nathalie Smuha, who’s working with the European Commission on AI ethics, said that following the feedback, the EU wants to implement more concrete rules.

IBM Europe Chairman Martin Jetter, who helped create the document, wrote in a post that developing ethical and responsible AI is a pressing concern, stating that these guidelines provide  “a strong example that other countries and regions should follow.”

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