Achieving Socio-Economic Parity Through the Lens of EU AI Act

This lecture addresses the ethical issues of AI systems, particularly discrimination and unfair treatment, which are becoming increasingly important as their use increases. The new European Union AI Law is intended to create a legal framework that promotes innovation while protecting fundamental rights and social values.

However, the authors criticize that existing concepts of fairness often do not take socioeconomic status (SES) into account and can thereby further increase economic inequalities. That's why they propose a new fairness concept called "Socioeconomic Parity (SEP)", which specifically supports disadvantaged groups and takes individual influencing factors such as work effort into account. The results of their research show that this approach can effectively reduce SES-related biases in AI systems and contribute to fairer AI decisions.

Eirini Ntoutsi is a Full Professor for Open Source Intelligence at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of the Bundeswehr Munich and the Research Institute CODE.