“A shallow review of what transformative AI means for animal welfare” by Lizka, Ben_West🔸

Epistemic status: This post — the result of a loosely timeboxed ~2-day sprint[1] — is more like “research notes with rough takes” than “report with solid answers.” You should interpret the things we say as best guesses, and not give them much more weight than that.

Summary

There's been some discussion of what “transformative AI may arrive soon” might mean for animal advocates.

After a very shallow review, we’ve tentatively concluded that radical changes to the animal welfare (AW) field are not yet warranted. In particular:

• Some ideas in this space seem fairly promising, but in the “maybe a researcher should look into this” stage, rather than “shovel-ready”
• We’re skeptical of the case for most speculative “TAI<>AW” projects

  • We think the most common version of this argument underrates how radically weird post-“transformative”-AI worlds would be, and how much this harms our ability to predict the longer-run [...]

---

Outline:

(00:28) Summary

(02:17) 1. Paradigm shifts, how they screw up our levers, and the eras we might target

(02:26) If advanced AI transforms the world, a lot of our assumptions about the world will soon be broken

(04:13) Should we be aiming to improve animal welfare in the long-run future (in transformed eras)?

(06:45) A Note on Pascalian Wagers

(08:36) Discounting for obsoletion & the value of normal-world-targeting interventions given a coming paradigm shift

(11:16) 2. Considering some specific interventions

(11:47) 2.1. Interventions that target normal(ish) eras

(11:53) 🔹 Leveraging AI progress to boost standard animal welfare work

(12:59) ❌ Trying to prevent near-term uses of AI that worsen conditions in factory farming (bad PLF)

(14:18) 2.2. Interventions that try to improve animal welfare in the long-run (past the paradigm shift)

(14:27) ⭐ Guarding against misguided prohibitions & other bad lock-ins

(16:33) 🔹 Exploring wild animal welfare & not over-indexing on farming

(17:59) 💬 Shaping AI values

(25:34) 💬 Other kinds of interventions? (/overview of post-paradigm AW interventions)

(27:57) 3. Potentially important questions

(32:58) Conclusion

(34:34) Appendices

(34:37) Some previous work & how this piece fits in

(36:21) How our work fits in

The original text contained 34 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
July 8th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tGdWott5GCnKYmRKb/a-shallow-review-of-what-transformative-ai-means-for-animal

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.