Fairness in AI Systems Development : Beyond EU AI Act Compliance

: Westerstrand, Salla

: Efi Papatheocharous, Siamak Farshidi, Slinger Jansen, Sonja Hyrynsalmi

: International Conference on Software Business

Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

: 2025

: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

: Software Business 15th International Conference, ICSOB 2024, Utrecht, The Netherlands, November 18–20, 2024, Proceedin

: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

: 99

: 113

: 978-3-031-85848-2

: 978-3-031-85849-9

: 1865-1348

: 1865-1356

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85849-9_9

: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85849-9_9

Rapid popularisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has accelerated initiatives for ethical AI development. In the European Union (EU), the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) entered into force on the 1st of August 2024, which has steered the focus in many organisations towards compliance. As the AIA is not an ethics guideline, it is reasonable to assume that measures beyond compliance are required for ethical AI systems development. To help unravel what is already covered by the AIA and what not, this paper studies the premise the AIA lays out for ethical AI systems development. Drawing from critical theory and using John Rawls’s theory of justice, the paper shows how the Act provides limited support for basic liberties, equality of opportunity and the least advantaged members of society, which calls for attention concerning ethical reflection in the AI system lifecycle to ensure ethically sustainable AI development. Recommendations are given on what kinds of ethical considerations organisations should include in Agile AI development process to steer the development towards justice as fairness.