On Algorithmic Fairness and the EU Regulations

TL;DR

This paper examines how EU laws, including AI regulation and GDPR, impact algorithmic fairness, highlighting legal possibilities and challenges in correcting biases in AI systems.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of legal compliance and non-compliance scenarios for AI fairness under EU regulations, adding legal insights to AI fairness research.

Findings

Correcting biases can be legally compliant under EU laws.

Legal non-compliance may arise in practical scenarios.

The paper enhances understanding of legal aspects in AI fairness.

Abstract

The short paper discusses algorithmic fairness by focusing on non-discrimination and a few important laws in the European Union (EU). In addition to the EU laws addressing discrimination explicitly, the discussion is based on the EU's recently enacted regulation for artificial intelligence (AI) and the older General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Through a theoretical scenario analysis, on one hand, the paper demonstrates that correcting discriminatory biases in AI systems can be legally done under the EU regulations. On the other hand, the scenarios also illustrate some practical scenarios from which legal non-compliance may follow. With these scenarios and the accompanying discussion, the paper contributes to the algorithmic fairness research with a few legal insights, enlarging and strengthening also the growing research domain of compliance in AI engineering.