Is AI Anti-Animal?

I am in the field and stupid me,  I missed this. 

The data behind training the models are created by humans. And humans look down on animals. This is not good for the future of animals. We need a way to minimize this biased data. 

In general, AI should go beyond data but we are not there yet. So we are stuck with "cleaning" the data to remove bias (and good luck with that). 

It should come as no surprise, then, that AI is also a replicator, perpetuator, and normalizer of speciesism.  

We need to work with big tech to eradicate this bias before it spreads into the future this anti-animal virus infected human brains. 

Speciesism – or “the belief that a mere difference in species justifies us in giving more weight to the interests of members of one species (usually our own . . . ) than the similar interests of members of other species” – is a prejudice, similar to sexism and racism” that underlies all human exploitation of other-than-human animals, including inside laboratories. 

Unlike other forms of human-on-human discrimination like sexism and racism, however, speciesism is not “widely accepted” to be “wrong”, and its “biased views and actions [] are shared, accepted, and performed by a large majority of society”. As a result, its elimination from AI is not a “high priority” (if it’s even on the list at all…):

“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.”

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To spark change ourselves, all we have to do is change the world (something we in the animal rights movement were already planning to do anyway, right?!)!

At present, “none of the major AI companies [] have any mention of animals in their ethical guidelines, and they’re not instructing data workers to consider how responses affect animals”. This means that speciesism will continue to be “hardwired into algorithms running our lives”.

And, this means that those of us in the animal rights movement must remain vigilant in our opposition to oppression in all of its forms – for changing our machines’ reflections of our world requires changing our world itself; and changing our world itself requires each and every one of us taking action.