  Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a direct impact on the daily life of
billions of people. Being applied to sectors like finance, health, security and
advertisement, AI fuels some of the biggest companies and research institutions
in the world. Its impact in the near future seems difficult to predict or
bound. In contrast to all this power, society remains mostly ignorant of the
capabilities and standard practices of AI today. To address this imbalance,
improving current interactions between people and AI systems, we propose a
transparency scheme to be implemented on any AI system open to the public. The
scheme is based on two pillars: Data Privacy and AI Transparency. The first
recognizes the relevance of data for AI, and is supported by GDPR. The second
considers aspects of AI transparency currently unregulated: AI capabilities,
purpose and source. We design this pillar based on ethical principles. For each
of the two pillars, we define a three-level display. The first level is based
on visual signs, inspired by traffic signs managing the interaction between
people and cars, and designed for quick and universal interpretability. The
second level uses factsheets, providing limited details. The last level
provides access to all available information. After detailing and exemplifying
the proposed transparency scheme, we define a set of principles for creating
transparent by design software, to be used during the integration of AI
components on user-oriented services.
