AI ethics: the case for including animals (my first published paper, Peter Singer's first on AI)

By Fai @ 2022-07-12T04:14 (+78)

This is a linkpost to https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-022-00187-z

Hi! I am Tse Yip Fai. This is a linkpost to my first published paper (second author). Since the paper is open access, I won't be doing any copy-and-paste here.

This is a seminal paper resulting from an one year research period. We hope that this paper can break the ground and raise awareness in the field of AI ethics so that they start caring about impact on animals. This, I believe, is not just relevant to the AI ethics field, but also to the AI alignment field.

If you prefer videos, here's a talk by Professor Singer and myself on the same topic.

Paolo Bova @ 2022-08-04T11:39 (+9)

I'm very glad to see a paper on this topic. This paper is precisely what the field of AI Ethics has been missing!

Congratulations on the first publication, Fai!

A few highlights from the paper:

"It is significant that philosophers who disagree strongly with the view that animals have rights or are entitled to equal consideration of interests nevertheless accept that factory farming is indefensible."

In general, the piece appears to do a great job at preempting arguments against animal ethics. Here's hoping a lot of people see this!

"Companies that contribute to making the factory farming industry more resilient and better able to resist replacement by less cruel and more sustainable alternatives are acting unethically."

This makes a very clear statement.

"So, instead of self-driving cars creating a new ethical problem with regard to hitting animals, we will have, when self-driving cars become common, a potential solution to an old ethical problem, and with the new solution, new responsibilities."

This section on self-driving cars is brilliantly practical. Hopefully AI ethics scholars take note as this seems like a rather undaunting and high profile case study.

"While we appreciate Delphi’s developers’ effort ... we are yet to see any efort to make it less speciesist. Until that happens, we agree with Delphi’s developers that Delphi’s output, or outputs from any similar models, should “not be used for advice for humans,” nor should it be used as a model to build ethics in AI."

I agree with this point and I suspect it applies more widely to research advancing AI capabilities.

Fai @ 2022-09-13T16:04 (+5)

Thank you for the great words! And thank you for taking the time to read. I am glad that you enjoyed it.

Vasco Grilo @ 2023-06-15T11:30 (+2)

Thanks for sharing, Fai!

This made me wonder whether ARC Evals should eventually assess how much AI models care about non-human animals. I sent an email to Beth Barnes.

Shaileen @ 2022-10-15T15:49 (+2)

Thank you for writing this post, and sharing your resources Fai! Very interesting read. As an aside to your note #25 on examples of the start-up or incubators for factory farm AI, I've also come across Innovent Technology (pigs), and CattleEye (dairy cows). They have received funding from VC and/or Government to develop their technologies.

Do let me know if you'd like some input for your projects - I might be of use!

Fai @ 2022-10-15T19:15 (+2)

Thank you for the comment and the information! It's really useful. Let's chat in private.