The Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence

I wish to sign the
Montreal Declaration
for a Responsible Development of
Artificial Intelligence

A declaration for what purpose?

The Montreal Declaration for responsible AI development has
three main objectives:

Develop an ethical framework for the development and deployment of AI;
Guide the digital transition so everyone beneﬁts from this technological revolution;
Open a national and international forum for discussion to collectively achieve equitable, inclusive, and ecologically sustainable AI development.

A declaration of what?

Principles

The Declaration’s first objective consists of identifying the ethical principles and values that promote the fundamental interests of people and groups. These principles applied to the digital and artificial intelligence field remain general and abstract. To read them correctly, it is important to keep the following points in mind:

Although they are presented as a list, there is no hierarchy. The last principle is not less important than the first. However, it is possible, depending on the circumstances, to lend more weight to one principle than another, or to consider one principle more relevant than another.
Although they are diverse, they must be interpreted consistently to prevent any conflict that could prevent them from being applied. As a general rule, the limits of one principle’s application are defined by another principle’s field of application.
Although they reﬂect the moral and political culture of the society in which they were developed, they provide the basis for an intercultural and international dialogue.
Although they can be interpreted in different ways, they cannot be interpreted in just any way. It is imperative that the interpretation be coherent.
Although these are ethical principles, they can be translated into political language and interpreted in legal fashion.

Recommendations were made based on these principles to establish guidelines for the digital transition within the Declaration’s ethical framework. It aims at covering a few key cross-sectorial themes to reﬂect on the transition towards a society in which AI helps promote the common good: algorithmic governance, digital literacy, digital inclusion of diversity and ecological sustainability.

A declaration for whom?

The Montreal Declaration is addressed to any person, organization and company that wishes to take part in the responsible development of artiﬁcial intelligence, whether it’s to contribute scientiﬁcally or technologically, to develop social projects, to elaborate rules (regulations, codes) that apply to it, to be able to contest bad or unwise approaches, or to be able to alert public opinion when necessary.

It is also addressed to political representatives, whether elected or named, whose citizens expect them to take stock of developing social changes, quickly establish a framework allowing a digital transition that serves the greater good, and anticipate the serious risks presented by AI development.

A Declaration according to what method?

The Declaration was born from an inclusive deliberation process that initiates a dialogue between citizens, experts, public ofﬁcials, industry stakeholders, civil organizations and professional associations. The advantages of this approach are threefold:

Collectively mediate AI’s social and ethical controversies;
Improve the quality of reﬂection on responsible AI;
Strengthen the legitimacy of the proposals for responsible AI.

The elaboration of principles and recommendations is a co-construction work that involved a variety of participants in public spaces, in the boardrooms of professional organizations, around international expert round tables, in research ofﬁces, classrooms or online, always with the same rigor.

After the Declaration?

Because the Declaration concerns a technology which has been steadily progressing since the 1950s, and whose pace of major innovations increases in exponential fashion, it is essential to perceive the Declaration as an open guidance document, to be revised and adapted according to the evolution of knowledge and techniques, as well as user feedback on AI use in society. At the end of the Declaration’s elaboration process, we have reached the starting point for an open and inclusive conversation surrounding the future of humanity being served by artiﬁcial intelligence technologies.

Preamble

For the first time in human history, it is possible to create autonomous systems capable of performing complex tasks of which natural intelligence alone was thought capable: processing large quantities of information, calculating and predicting, learning and adapting responses to changing situations, and recognizing and classifying objects. Given the immaterial nature of these tasks, and by analogy with human intelligence, we designate these wide-ranging systems under the general name of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence constitutes a major form of scientific and technological progress, which can generate considerable social benefits by improving living conditions and health, facilitating justice, creating wealth, bolstering public safety, and mitigating the impact of human activities on the environment and the climate. Intelligent machines are not limited to performing better calculations than human beings; they can also interact with sentient beings, keep them company and take care of them.

However, the development of artificial intelligence does pose major ethical challenges and social risks. Indeed, intelligent machines can restrict the choices of individuals and groups, lower living standards, disrupt the organization of labor and the job market, influence politics, clash with fundamental rights, exacerbate social and economic inequalities, and affect ecosystems, the climate and the environment. Although scientific progress, and living in a society, always carry a risk, it is up to the citizens to determine the moral and political ends that give meaning to the risks encountered in an uncertain world.

The lower the risks of its deployment, the greater the benefits of artificial intelligence will be. The first danger of artificial intelligence development consists in giving the illusion that we can master the future through calculations. Reducing society to a series of numbers and ruling it through algorithmic procedures is an old pipe dream that still drives human ambitions. But when it comes to human affairs, tomorrow rarely resembles today, and numbers cannot determine what has moral value, nor what is socially desirable.

The principles of the current declaration rest on the common belief that human beings seek to grow as social beings endowed with sensations, thoughts and feelings, and strive to fulfill their potential by freely exercising their emotional, moral and intellectual capacities. It is incumbent on the various public and private stakeholders and policymakers at the local, national and international level to ensure that the development and deployment of artificial intelligence are compatible with the protection of fundamental human capacities and goals, and contribute toward their fuller realization. With this goal in mind, one must interpret the proposed principles in a coherent manner, while taking into account the specific social, cultural, political and legal contexts of their application.

Principles

Principle of

Well-being

The development and use of artiﬁcial intelligence systems () must permit the growth of the well-being of all sentient beings.

AIS must help individuals improve their living conditions, their health, and their working conditions.
AIS must allow individuals to pursue their preferences, so long as they do not cause harm to other sentient beings.
AIS must allow people to exercise their mental and physical capacities.
AIS must not become a source of ill-being, unless it allows us to achieve a superior well-being than what one could attain otherwise.
AIS use should not contribute to increasing stress, anxiety, or a sense of being harassed by one’s digital environment.

Principle of

Respect for autonomy

must be developed and used with respect for the autonomy of individuals and with the goal of increasing individuals' control over their lives and their environment.

AIS must not be developed or used to impose a particular lifestyle on individuals, whether directly or indirectly, by implementing oppressive surveillance and evaluation or incentive mechanisms.
AIS must not be developed or used to impose a particular lifestyle on individuals, whether directly or indirectly, by implementing oppressive surveillance and evaluation or incentive mechanisms.
AIS must allow individuals to fulﬁll their own moral objectives and their conception of a life worth living.
It is crucial to empower citizens regarding digital technologies by ensuring access to the relevant forms of knowledge, promoting the learning of fundamental skills (digital and media literacy), and fostering the development of critical thinking.
AIS must not be developed to spread untrustworthy information, lies, or propaganda, and should be designed with a view to containing their dissemination.
The development of AIS must avoid creating dependencies through attention-capturing techniques or the imitation of human characteristics (appearance, voice, etc.) in ways that could cause confusion between AIS and humans.

Principle of

Protection of privacy and intimacy

Privacy and intimacy must be protected from intrusion and data acquisition and archiving systems ().

Personal spaces in which people are not subjected to surveillance or digital evaluation must be protected from the intrusion of AIS and data acquisition and archiving systems (DAAS).
The intimacy of thoughts and emotions must be strictly protected from AIS and DAAS uses capable of causing harm, especially uses that impose moral judgments on people or their lifestyle choices.
People must always have the right to digital disconnection in their private lives, and AIS should explicitly offer the option to disconnect at regular intervals, without encouraging people to stay connected.
People must have extensive control over information regarding their preferences. AIS must not create individual preference proﬁles to inﬂuence the behavior of the individuals without their free and informed consent.
DAAS must guarantee data conﬁdentiality and personal proﬁle anonymity.
Every person must be able to exercise extensive control over their personal data, especially when it comes to its collection, use, and dissemination. Access to AIS and digital services by individuals must not be made conditional on their abandoning control or ownership of their personal data.
Individuals should be free to donate their personal data to research organizations in order to contribute to the advancement of knowledge.
The integrity of one’s personal identity must be guaranteed. AIS must not be used to imitate or alter a person’s appearance, voice, or other individual characteristics in order to damage one’s reputation or manipulate other people.

Principle of

Solidarity

The development of must be compatible with maintaining the bonds of solidarity among people and generations.

AIS must not threaten the preservation of fulﬁlling moral and emotional human relationships, and should be developed with the goal of fostering these relationships and reducing people’s vulnerability and isolation.
AIS must be developed with the goal of collaborating with humans on complex tasks and should foster collaborative work between humans.
AIS should not be implemented to replace people in duties that require quality human relationships, but should be developed to facilitate these relationships.
Health care systems that use AIS must take into consideration the importance of a patient’s relationships with family and health care staff.
AIS development should not encourage cruel behavior toward robots designed to resemble human beings or non-human animals in appearance or behavior.
AIS should help improve risk management and foster conditions for a society with a more equitable and mutual distribution of individual and collective risks.

Principle of

Democratic participation

must meet intelligibility, justiﬁability, and accessibility criteria, and must be subjected to democratic scrutiny, debate, and control.

AIS processes that make decisions affecting a person’s life, quality of life, or reputation must be intelligible to their creators.
The decisions made by AIS affecting a person’s life, quality of life, or reputation should always be justiﬁable in a language that is understood by the people who use them or who are subjected to the consequences of their use. Justiﬁcation consists in making transparent the most important factors and parameters shaping the decision, and should take the same form as the justiﬁcation we would demand of a human making the same kind of decision.
The code for algorithms, whether public or private, must always be accessible to the relevant public authorities and stakeholders for veriﬁcation and control purposes.
The discovery of AIS operating errors, unexpected or undesirable effects, security breaches, and data leaks must imperatively be reported to the relevant public authorities, stakeholders, and those affected by the situation.
In accordance with the transparency requirement for public decisions, the code for decision-making algorithms used by public authorities must be accessible to all, with the exception of algorithms that present a high risk of serious danger if misused.
For public AIS that has a signiﬁcant impact on the life of citizens, citizens should have the opportunity and skills to deliberate on the social parameters of these AIS, their objectives, and the limits of their use.
We must at all times be able to verify that AIS are doing what they were programed for and what they are used for.
Any person using a service should know if a decision concerning them or affecting them was made by an AIS.
Any user of a service employing chatbots should be able to easily identify whether they are interacting with an AIS or a real person.
Artiﬁcial intelligence research should remain open and accessible to all.

Principle of

Equity

The development and use of must contribute to the creation of a just and equitable society.

AIS must be designed and trained so as not to create, reinforce, or reproduce discrimination based on — among other things — social, sexual, ethnic, cultural, or religious differences.
AIS development must help eliminate relationships of domination between groups and people based on differences of power, wealth, or knowledge.
AIS development must produce social and economic beneﬁts for all by reducing social inequalities and vulnerabilities.
Industrial AIS development must be compatible with acceptable working conditions at every step of their life cycle, from natural resources extraction to recycling, and including data processing.
The digital activity of users of AIS and digital services should be recognized as labor that contributes to the functioning of algorithms and creates value.
ccess to fundamental resources, knowledge and digital tools must be guaranteed for all.
We should support the development of commons algorithms — and of open data needed to train them — and expand their use, as a socially equitable objective.

Principle of

Diversity inclusion

The development and use of must be compatible with maintaining social and cultural diversity and must not restrict the scope of lifestyle choices or personal experiences.

AIS development and use must not lead to the homogenization of society through the standardization of behavior and opinions.
From the moment algorithms are conceived, AIS development and deployment must take into consideration the multitude of expressions of social and cultural diversity present in the society.
AI development environments, whether in research or industry, must be inclusive and reﬂect the diversity of the individuals and groups of the society.
AIS must avoid using acquired data to lock individuals into a user proﬁle, ﬁx their personal identity, or conﬁne them to a ﬁltering bubble, which would restrict and conﬁne their possibilities for personal development — especially in ﬁelds such as education, justice, or business.
AIS must not be developed or used with the aim of limiting the free expression of ideas or the opportunity to hear diverse opinions, both being essential conditions of a democratic society.
For each service category, the AIS offering must be diversiﬁed to prevent de facto monopolies from forming and undermining individual freedoms.

Principle of

Prudence

Every person involved in development must exercise caution by anticipating, as far as possible, the adverse consequences of use and by taking the appropriate measures to avoid them.

It is necessary to develop mechanisms that consider the potential for the double use — beneﬁcial and harmful —of AI research and AIS development (whether public or private) in order to limit harmful uses.
When the misuse of an AIS endangers public health or safety and has a high probability of occurrence, it is prudent to restrict open access and public dissemination to its algorithm.
Before being placed on the market and whether they are offered for charge or for free, AIS must meet strict reliability, security, and integrity requirements and be subjected to tests that do not put people’s lives in danger, harm their quality of life, or negatively impact their reputation or psychological integrity. These tests must be open to the relevant public authorities and stakeholders.
The development of AIS must preempt the risks of user data misuse and protect the integrity and conﬁdentiality of personal data.
The errors and ﬂaws discovered in AIS and SAAD should be publicly shared, on a global scale, by public institutions and businesses in sectors that pose a signiﬁcant danger to personal integrity and social organization.

Principle of

Responsibility

The development and use of must not contribute to lessening the responsibility of human beings when decisions must be made.

Only human beings can be held responsible for decisions stemming from recommendations made by AIS, and the actions that proceed therefrom.
In all areas where a decision that affects a person’s life, quality of life, or reputation must be made, where time and circumstance permit, the ﬁnal decision must be taken by a human being and that decision should be free and informed
The decision to kill must always be made by human beings, and responsibility for this decision must not be transferred to an AIS.
People who authorize AIS to commit a crime or an offense, or demonstrate negligence by allowing AIS to commit them, are responsible for this crime or offense.
When damage or harm has been inﬂicted by an AIS, and the AIS is proven to be reliable and to have been used as intended, it is not reasonable to place blame on the people involved in its development or use.

Principle of

Sustainable development

The development and use of must be carried out so as to ensure a strong environmental sustainability of the planet.

AIS hardware, its digital infrastructure and the relevant objects on which it relies such as data centers, must aim for the greatest energy efﬁciency and to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions over its entire life cycle.
AIS hardware, its digital infrastructure and the relevant objects on which it relies, must aim to generate the least amount of electric and electronic waste and to provide for maintenance, repair, and recycling procedures according to the principles of circular economy.
AIS hardware, its digital infrastructure and the relevant objects on which it relies, must minimize our impact on ecosystems and biodiversity at every stage of its life cycle, notably with respect to the extraction of resources and the ultimate disposal of the equipment when it has reached the end of its useful life.
Public and private actors must support the environmentally responsible development of AIS in order to combat the waste of natural resources and produced goods, build sustainable supply chains and trade, and reduce global pollution.

Consult the glossary of the Declaration

Credits

The writing of the Montréal Declaration for the responsible development of artificial intelligence is the result of the work of a multidisciplinary and inter-university scientific team that draws on a citizen consultation process and a dialogue with experts and stakeholders of development.

MARC-ANTOINE DILHAC
Declaration Development Committee Leader
Scientific Co-director of the Declaration, Full Professor, Department of Philosophy, UdeM, Chair of the Ethics and Politics Group, Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ), Canada Research Chair in Public Ethics and Political Theory

CHRISTOPHE ABRASSART
Citizen Deliberation and Co-construction Leader
Scientific Co-director of the Declaration, professor in the School of design and Co-director of Lab Ville Prospective of the Faculty of Planning of the Université de Montréal, member of Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ)

YOSHUA BENGIO, Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, UdeM, Scientific Director of MILA and IVADO

GUILLAUME CHICOISNE, Scientific Programs Director, IVADO

NATHALIE DE MARCELLIS-WARIN, Full Professor, Polytechnique Montréal, President and Chief Executive officer, Center for Interuniversity Reasearch and Analysis of Organizations (CIRANO)

SÉBASTIEN GAMBS, Professor of Computer Science of Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving and Ethical Analysis of Big Data

VINCENT GAUTRAIS, Full Professor, Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal; Director of the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP); Chairholder of the L.R. Wilson Chair in Information Technology and E-Commerce Law

MARTIN GIBERT, Ethics Counsellor at IVADO and researcher in Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ)

LYSE LANGLOIS, Full Professor and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Social Science; Director of the Institut d’éthique appliquée (IDÉA) ; Researcher Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT)

FRANÇOIS LAVIOLETTE, Full Professor, Computer Science, Université Laval; Director of the Centre de recherche en données massives (CRDM)

PASCALE LEHOUX, Full Professor at the School of Public Health of University of Montreal (ESPUM); Chair on Responsible Innovation in Health

JOCELYN MACLURE, Full Professor of philosophy, Université Laval and President of the Quebec Ethics in Science and Technology Commission (CEST)

MARIE MARTEL, Professor in École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal

JOËLLE PINEAU, Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar, McGill University; Director of Facebook AI Lab in Montréal; Co-director of the Reasoning and Learning Lab

PETER RAILTON, Professor of philosophy, University of Michigan

CATHERINE RÉGIS, Associate professor, Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal; Chairholder, Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Culture in Health Law and Policy; Regular researcher, Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP)

CHRISTINE TAPPOLET, Full Professor, Department of Philosophy, UdeM, Director of Centre de recherché en éthique (CRÉ)

NATHALIE VOARINO, Scientific Coordinator, PhD Candidate in Bioethics of Université de Montréal

The Declaration is available in 10 languages

Spanish (Castilian) - Español (castellano)

Italian - Italiano

Russian - русский язык

Arabic - العربية

German - Deutsch

Chinese -中文

Portuguese - Português

Japanese -日本語

Reports

Montréal Declaration Activity Report (2018 – 2022)

Cover Report on the activities of the Declaration

Download the full Report

Download the bibliography

Report of the Montréal Declaration on Responsible AI

On November 3, 2017, Université de Montréal launched the co-construction process of the Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artiﬁcial Intelligence. One year later, the results of the citizen deliberation process was published. Dozens of events were organised to engage in discussion around the societal issues of Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI), and some 15 deliberative workshops were held, involving over 500 citizens, experts and stakeholders from all walks of life.

Download the full Report

Déclaration IA Responsable partie 1 : Démarche et méthodologie

The Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence

I wish to sign theMontreal Declarationfor a Responsible Development ofArtificial Intelligence

A declaration for what purpose?

A declaration of what?

A declaration for whom?

A Declaration according to what method?

After the Declaration?

Preamble

Principles

Principle of

Well-being

Principle of

Respect for autonomy

Principle of

Protection of privacy and intimacy

Principle of

Solidarity

Principle of

Democratic participation

Principle of

Equity

Principle of

Diversity inclusion

Principle of

Prudence

Principle of

Responsibility

Principle of

Sustainable development

Credits

The Declaration is available in 10 languages

Reports

Montréal Declaration Activity Report (2018 – 2022)

Report of the Montréal Declaration on Responsible AI

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

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I wish to sign the
Montreal Declaration
for a Responsible Development of
Artificial Intelligence