Animals and AI. The role of animals in AI research and application – An overview and ethical evaluation

Bossert, Leonie; Hagendorff, Thilo

doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101678

Cited by 22 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…They are: "Towards animal-friendly machines" by Oliver Bendel [32], "AI Ethics and Value Alignment for Nonhuman Animals" by Soenke Ziesche [33], "Moral Consideration of Nonhumans in the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence" by Andrea Owe and Seth Baum [34], 33 and "Animals and AI. The role of animals in AI research and application-An overview and ethical evaluation" by Leonie Bossert and Thilo Hagendorf [35]. These four papers have, in our opinion, quite different focuses than ours.…”

Section: The Lack Of Concern For Animals In the Fields Of Ai And Ai E...mentioning

confidence: 87%

“…Building on Casey Fiesler's open-source spreadsheet named "Tech Ethics Curricula: A Collection of Syllabi" 35 we also conducted a search globally on Google and Baidu 36 for courses on AI ethics of which the detailed course materials 37 are accessible. We found 71 AI ethics or computer science ethics courses in which we were able to assess the course materials.…”

Section: The Lack Of Concern For Animals In the Fields Of Ai And Ai E...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As we see with the current debates over the ethics of the development and use of fossil fuels, the 34 Paper [24] did make the claim that animals is missing from the discussions of AI and AI ethics, but did not make the explicit claim that animals should be part of the scope of AI ethics. 35 https:// docs. google.…”

Section: The Ai Industry's Moral Responsibility (To All Sentient Beings)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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AI ethics: the case for including animals

Singer

Tse

2022

AI Ethics

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The ethics of artificial intelligence, or AI ethics, is a rapidly growing field, and rightly so. While the range of issues and groups of stakeholders concerned by the field of AI ethics is expanding, with speculation about whether it extends even to the machines themselves, there is a group of sentient beings who are also affected by AI, but are rarely mentioned within the field of AI ethics—the nonhuman animals. This paper seeks to explore the kinds of impact AI has on nonhuman animals, the severity of these impacts, and their moral implications. We hope that this paper will facilitate the development of a new field of philosophical and technical research regarding the impacts of AI on animals, namely, the ethics of AI as it affects nonhuman animals.

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Section: The Lack Of Concern For Animals In the Fields Of Ai And Ai E...mentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: The Lack Of Concern For Animals In the Fields Of Ai And Ai E...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Ai Industry's Moral Responsibility (To All Sentient Beings)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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AI ethics: the case for including animals

Singer

Tse

2022

AI Ethics

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“…Hence, the state of the art in AI ethics regarding non-anthropocentric methodologies is rather tenuous. At present, to the best of our knowledge only five papers in AI ethics exist that argue for a moral extension of the field and take animals into account [17][18][19][20][21]. Ziesche [17] argues that the value alignment problem, which is at the heart of AI safety debates in the context of potential malignant artificial general intelligence, should be extended to the values of animals or rather to the values of species since he conflates the individual with the species level throughout his paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Owe and Baum [18] stress that AI ethics, for instance when stating ethical principles, should take nonhumans such as animals into account since they merit direct moral consideration. Bossert and Hagendorff [19] collect examples where animals are affected by AI systems, for instance in neuroscientific animal experiments that are supposed to inspire artificial neural net architectures, and in contexts like factory farming. Singer and Tse [20] go in a similar direction by analyzing further examples of AI's impact on animals, for instance with regard to autonomous cars' swerving behavior when confronted with animals on roads, and AI systems used in factory farming.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speciesist bias in AI: how AI applications perpetuate discrimination and unfair outcomes against animals

Hagendorff

Bossert²,

Tse

et al. 2022

AI Ethics

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Massive efforts are made to reduce biases in both data and algorithms to render AI applications fair. These efforts are propelled by various high-profile cases where biased algorithmic decision-making caused harm to women, people of color, minorities, etc. However, the AI fairness field still succumbs to a blind spot, namely its insensitivity to discrimination against animals. This paper is a critical comment on current fairness research in AI. It is the first to describe the ‘speciesist bias’ and investigate it in several different AI systems by reflecting on the problem via a normative analysis and by probing, in several case studies, image recognition, word embedding, and language models with established methods for bias detection. We claim that animals matter morally and that discriminating against them is unethical. Furthermore, we provide evidence for speciesist biases in all the mentioned areas of AI. We find that speciesist biases are solidified by many mainstream AI applications, especially in the fields of computer vision as well as natural language processing. In both cases, this occurs because the models are trained on datasets in which speciesist patterns prevail. Therefore, AI technologies currently play a significant role in perpetuating and normalizing violence against animals. To change this, AI fairness frameworks must widen their scope and include mitigation measures for speciesist biases. This paper addresses the AI community in this regard and stresses the influence AI systems can have on either increasing or reducing the violence that is inflicted on animals, especially on farmed animals.

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The ethics of sustainable AI: Why animals (should) matter for a sustainable use of AI

Bossert

Hagendorff

2023

Sustainable Development

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Technologies equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) influence our everyday lives in a variety of ways. Due to their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, their high use of energy, but also their impact on fairness issues, these technologies are increasingly discussed in the “sustainable AI” discourse. However, current “sustainable AI” approaches remain anthropocentric. In this article, we argue from the perspective of applied ethics that such anthropocentric outlook falls short. We present a sentientist approach, arguing that the normative foundation of sustainability and sustainable development—that is, theories of intra‐ and intergenerational justice—should include sentient animals. Consequently, theories of sustainable AI must also be non‐anthropocentric. Moreover, we investigate consequences of our approach for applying AI technologies in a sustainable way.

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Animals and AI. The role of animals in AI research and application – An overview and ethical evaluation

Cited by 22 publications

References 30 publications

AI ethics: the case for including animals

AI ethics: the case for including animals

Speciesist bias in AI: how AI applications perpetuate discrimination and unfair outcomes against animals

The ethics of sustainable AI: Why animals (should) matter for a sustainable use of AI

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