AI, Animals & Digital Minds NYC 2025: Retrospective

By Jonah Woodward, Sentient Futures (formerly AI for Animals), Constance Li, carolinaollive @ 2025-10-31T03:09 (+41)

Our Mission: Rapidly scale up the size and influence of the community trying to make AI and other transformative technologies go well for sentient nonhumans. 

One of the key ways we do this is through our events. This article gives insight into our most recent event, AI, Animals and Digital Minds NYC 2025 including:

• Lightning talks
• Topics and ideas covered
• Attendee feedback
• Event finances
• Lessons for future events
• Acknowledgements
• More information on our community

Our next conference, Sentient Futures Summit Bay Area 2026, is now confirmed for February 6th-8th (the weekend before Effective Altruism Global)! You can register and find out more information here (Early Bird tickets valid until December 1st).

We will continue pairing our conferences with EA Global events going forwards – so join our community to stay updated!

Overview 

AI, Animals & Digital Minds (AIADM) New York City took place from October 9th-10th 2025, at Prime Produce in Hell’s Kitchen. It was both our first event in NYC, and our first event that was exclusively an ‘unconference’ – a format which allows attendees to pitch their own ideas for talks, discussions and workshops during the event. 

The event involved:

• 90+ attendees.
• 15 volunteers
• 18 lightning talks
• 3 pre-organized meet-ups
• 22 unconference sessions organized by attendees

We also hosted an afterparty for EAG NYC on October 12th at the same venue, which had around 150 attendees. 

Content

Keynote Address – Jeff Sebo [Watch here]

Lightning Talks

Day I: Animal-Focused

• Including Non-Human Welfare in AI Alignment – Adrià Moret [Watch here]
• Animals in the Room: Bringing Animals from Behind the Data – Dr Erin B Ryan [Watch here]
• How You Can Stop the Tautology Infecting Our Courts That Only Humans Matter – Christopher Berry [Watch here]
• Harnessing AI to Shape Animal-Friendly Urban Spaces – Allen Lu & Alisha Vavilakolanu [Watch here]
• Mapping Global Aquaculture Expansion: What Species Diversity Means for Animal Welfare – Chiawen Chiang [Watch here]
• Reinforcement Learning from Animal Feedback – Lee Wall [Watch here]
• NatureLM-audio Demo: Exploring Animal Sounds with AI – Diane Kim [Watch here]
• Aligning Policymakers on Wild Animal Welfare – Ben Stevenson

Day II: Digital Minds-Focused

• Power-Seeking Theorems and AI Welfare – Bob Fischer [Watch here]
• Three Questions for Conscious AI – Ben Mylius
• Moral Progress in, and with, AI – Anonymous speaker
• Brain Emulation: A Landscape Survey – Evan Boyar [Watch here]
• Consciousness in the Making – Jay Luong [Watch here]
• Linking Digital Minds and Artificial Moral Agents – Soenke Ziesche [Watch here]
• Empirically Probing AI Consciousness: Early Results and Learnings – Cameron Berg [Watch here]
• The Importance of Simple Future Minds – Oscar Horta [Watch here]

Unconference Sessions Highlights

Exploring the Dimensions and Criteria of Consciousness Across Biological and Digital Systems 

• Participants explored what “consciousness” means and whether it can be decomposed into distinct dimensions (e.g., phenomenal experience, valence, integration, continuity, self-consciousness).
• Agreement that a false negative when testing for sentience is more harmful than a false positive.
• How information systems are organised is morally irrelevant – evidence of valence states (the ability for a mind to suffer) is sufficient for a conversation on moral status. 

Reverse Alignment: AI as a Tool for Aligning Human and Non-Human Interests

• The session discussed how human development over the past 10,000 years has created a deep misalignment with non-human interests — and suggested that AI could help realign human and non-human welfare (reverse alignment).
• Participants discussed using AI as an objective tool for improving human coordination, understanding social dynamics, and addressing large-scale ethical challenges such as wild animal suffering and invertebrate welfare.

AI Right Now: Helping and Harming Advocacy

• Participants discussed the various ways that they are currently using AI to improve research, advocacy and other work.
• They discussed the concern that the proliferation of AI bots might dilute the impact of email campaigns. 

Disrupting Binary Utopia-Dystopia Thinking in Conceptualisations of the Future

• Attendees thought creatively about ‘middle paths’ the future could take with AI – it may not be wholly positive or wholly negative.
• Disrupting this common utopia-dystopia thinking may help us think about more nuanced outcomes that could result from AI development. 

How Do We Count Digital Minds? 

• Participants considered metaphysical questions about AI models – are they best understood as events unfolding in time or as entities, as single instances of sentience (e.g., in a forward pass), or a more distributed form (e.g., across data centers) – and what ethical treatment of such systems would involve under different definitions of “mind”.
• The group examined perspectives on collective or distributed consciousness, debating whether multiple instances of an AI share identity or goals, and how differing metaphysical and ethical frameworks affect how we ascribe moral consideration.

Conservation and Animal Welfare

• The session examined tensions between conservation and animal welfare, highlighting how conservation efforts serve human interests (e.g., when tackling invasive species).
• Some interventions praised such as wildlife contraceptives, sterilization or inoculation
• The discussion advocated gradual, publicly supported steps toward proactive wild animal welfare improvements.

Event Feedback

The below information is taken from a feedback survey completed by 31 AIADM attendees. 

1:1s and Spontaneous Connections 

Many respondents reported that the most valuable experiences came from scheduled 1:1 meet-ups and unplanned chats. 97% of participants rated spontaneous connections as “extremely valuable” (52%) or “valuable” (45%). 68% said scheduled 1:1s were either “extremely valuable” or “valuable” (compared to only 6% saying they were “neutral” or “unvaluable”). Below, are some respondents’ descriptions of their most valuable experiences: 

•  “I received excellent career advice which makes it more likely that I will pursue a more impactful career path outside of academia [...] confirmed a collaborator to advance my project of including non-human welfare in AI alignment.”
• “Talking to various people about potential ideas to found and that are needed in the movement that could have the most impact, I've come away with a solid list of things to move forward with!”
• “Individual conversations with folks with very different backgrounds to me - sense of possibility to connect across industry, discipline etc.”

26 respondents (84%) said they had made at least one impactful connection (defined as “connections which might accelerate you on your path to impact, e.g. someone who might connect you to a job opportunity or a new collaborator on your work”).

Finances

The total estimated spend for AIADM NYC was $20,109. This was significantly less than our two previous events in 2025 (which were $74k and $36k respectively). This was largely due to the reduced scale of this event: AIADM NYC was a day shorter than AIADM London, and had less than half the attendees of AIA Bay Area. 

However, it’s also important to note that AIADM NYC took place in Downtown Manhattan, which is typically a very expensive area. Our venue, Prime Produce, was likely cheaper than similar alternatives, as it offers its space at lower prices for socially-minded or altruistic organisations hosting events. 

The average spend per attendee of all Sentient Futures events this year is as follows:

• AIA Bay Area 2025: $296 per attendee.
• AIADM London 2025: (roughly) $240 per attendee.
• AIADM NYC 2025: $217 per attendee. 

Standard tickets were $150, and sponsor tickets $750. All speakers, organisers and volunteers were offered free tickets.  

Lessons for Future Events

Invest in satellite events and networking opportunities

Given the recurring feedback about the value of 1:1s and spontaneous connections, we would like to increase opportunities for individuals to network at our future events – primarily through satellite events, and networking sessions. For instance, while our AIADM/EAG afterparty happened after most participants had filled in the feedback form, we suspect this was highly valued as a networking opportunity, and plan to place more emphasis on this in future. Because the afterparty also had many attendees outside of the Sentient Futures community, this was a great opportunity to increase awareness about what we do among EAG attendees. We will actively incorporate more satellite events, networking sessions, and meet-ups alongside our conferences whenever capacity allows.

Ensure food is properly distributed

Some respondents expressed dissatisfaction about the catering, which was largely due to distribution issues. For instance, gluten free food ran out quickly, so it will be important in future to ensure this is reserved for those who require it. Also, some food was temporarily misplaced on the Friday, which resulted in insufficient portions for some attendees – a more thorough system for receiving food deliveries would help resolve this, to ensure everything is moved to food stations in a timely manner. 

Encourage more structure during unconference sessions

While attendees enjoyed the unconference sessions and the conversations had, some felt that they could be slightly unfocused, or dominated by a minority of participants. This could easily be resolved by simply giving better guidance to the facilitators – for example, to ensure everyone is getting the chance to speak, keeping an eye on the time and encouraging attendees to summarise any action points before the end of the session. 

Acknowledgements

First, a big thank-you to our speakers and unconference facilitators for defining the agenda for the event and helping us advance the discourse on emerging technologies, artificial sentience, and animal welfare. 

We would like to thank Prime Produce Apprentice Cooperative for hosting us at their incredible venue in Hell’s Kitchen, and for their support throughout the event. Many attendees were really positive about the cozy yet practical space that they provided. In particular, we’d like to mention Michael Middleton, Jeron Hsu and David Isaac Hecht. 

Thank you also to Rae Phillips Smith for the wonderful work she did putting the website together for the unconference. 

Lastly, a big thank-you to our volunteer team in blue t-shirts! They were essential for every aspect of AIADM NYC, and the event couldn’t have gone ahead without them.

Get Involved

Next conference

Sentient Futures Summit Bay Area 2026 is confirmed for February 6th-8th (the weekend before Effective Altruism Global)! Register today and get 30% off with our Early Bird ticket (valid until December 1st). 

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Contact

Email: hello at sentientfutures dot ai

Website: https://sentientfutures.ai