Project summary

~130 people  joined together over the span of three days to learn, connect, and make progress towards making AI safe for nonhumans. See a more detailed summary in this retrospective.

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

The goal was to continue field building in the intersection of AI and Nonhumans.

I did this through promoting the conference widely and getting attendees and speakers who ranged from academia, tech, policy, and nonprofit to come together in an environment that fostered learning and collaboration.

For more details including what went well and what didn't, see the behind the scenes writeup.

How will this funding be used?

To retroactively fund the cost of the running the event. Please see our budget breakdown.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

The event was run mainly by me with help from a couple of co-organizers including Jonathan Birch, who was key to getting the venue at LSE, Helene Kortshack, Allison Agnello, and Joseph Alcantra.

Here is my track record on similar projects in the past 1.5 years:

2023

• Helped start the informational website www.aiforanimals.org

• Wrote an EA Forum post, Animal Advocacy in the Age of AI (57 karma)

• Gave significant feedback to the EA Forum post What AI Could Mean for Animals (115 karma)

• Our Slack has 4 channels devoted to AI, two of them are among our most viewed channels at 100 users who viewed per month

• Ran the AI and Animals Idea Jam in June 2023 

• Developed an AI and Animals wiki database, viewed over 390 times so far

• Created an LLM text to text prompt library for animal advocates, viewed over 750 times so far

• Gave a welcome speech to 800+ attendees at the Animal Vegan Advocacy conference about the importance of AI on the future of farmed animals, a workshop to 60+ attendees about how to use AI tools, and led a meetup about animals and longtermism.

• Interviewed by Gen V about the potential impact of AI on animals in this Youtube video

• Facilitated 10 AI teaching sessions to animal advocate professionals including 1 workshop at AVA, which was attended by 60+ participants. As our capacity decreased, we outsourced the workshops through a partnership with NFPS.ai where we provided clients and funding and they provided training and development of custom AI tools for 4 organizations. 
  

2024

• Attended EAG Bay Area: GCR and hosted a Farmed Animal Welfare meetup with a discussion centered around AI and animals

• Facilitated the AI for Animals Meetup at AVA 2023

• Ran 4 a SF Pro-Animal People in Tech meetup in March 2024.

• Have been running a monthly AI and Animals virtual coalition meeting for 8 months. The coalition has 120+ members and usually 5-7 attend each meeting and 50-80% of the action items are achieved by the following meeting.

• Organized and the second AI, Animals, and Digital Minds conference/retreat in London which received 260+ applications

• Wrote an Asterisk article about AI in Animal Farming (publication pending)

What were the outcomes of this project?

It has only been 2 weeks since the project concluded, but we have some promising outcome indicators already:

• Continued momentum from the first conference in 2023

  • The Earth Species Project was in the audience for the last conference. They are not usually involved in EA or animal advocacy spaces, but were able to have a platform at this event to speak to these audiences and find new collaborators.

  • Amber Sheldon, a PhD student at Brown University, wrote part of her dissertation as a rebuttal to a talk about Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) by Walter Veit at the 2023 conference. During this year’s conference, they joined a panel together to discuss their different viewpoints.

• Established potential funding for projects at this intersection

  • There were at least 2 funding conversations that happened as a result of attendees being able to talk at the retreat.

• Grew interest/literature in the field

  • Zach Brown, an research assistant in Economics at MIT, attended the conference and wrote a blog post about PLF inspired in part by the ideas presented by the speakers. 

• Created epistemic updates

  • Many people said they updated their thinking in response to talks or discussions from the event. This was especially true for Bob Fischer’s talk Animal-friendly AI = Misaligned AI and conversations during the retreat with James Faville where he talked about backfire risks of certain interventions and s-risks with digital minds.

• Connected with other groups working in the space

  • We collaborated with adjacent groups, such as Mooanalytica who hosted the Human-Computer Farm Animal Interactions (HCFAI) webinar, on promotions. This helps to set the stage for future collaborations.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

The project received $250 in donations from attendees.