Artificial Intelligence and Discrimination – Strenghts and Weaknesses of the Current European Anti-discrimination Legal Framework

We are witnessing an enormous development of artificial intelligence (AI) which boosts economic productivity, creates new job opportunities, and gives hope that human life will be more prosperous. On the other side, AI, as a new system, that is undiscovered and unpredictable, creates ethical and legal dilemmas and threats to human rights violations, in the context of the principle of equality, the rule of law, and democratic principles, if it is used in an inappropriate way. The subject of the paper is discrimination in the process of AI application in different fields of people’s everyday lives. The aim of this investigation is to analyze provisions in the recently adopted European Union (EU) AI Act and the Council of Europe Framework Convention which are expected to prevent discriminatory treatment through an AI life cycle, and to give a bird-view of the selected cases of AI-related discrimination, as well as of the position of the Serbian national authorities in that regard. On that road, the authors will provide a critical and comparative analysis of these two instruments governing the AI application. Subsequent to that, the paper is focused on the position taken by the Serbian authorities in order to examine the level of its readiness to stay in line with the legal challenges the AI implementation brings, and illustrates a current example which is related to the implementation of the Social Card Law. The methodological framework includes doctrinal, comparative, and descriptive methods.