Congratulations on this amazing work! 👏🏽
10
AI, Animals, and Digital Minds 2024 Conference and Retreat
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.
donated $15
donated $15
donated $50
Constance Li
2 months ago
@Tomohaire it was in the UK! Next year I'm thinking about having it in the Bay Area, but if you want to carry it on in the UK, I support that.
donated $50
donated $1,500
Ryan Kidd
3 months ago
Main points in favor of this grant
I think that research into the possible sentience or moral patienthood of digital minds is important and neglected. Relatively few philosophy academics are researching this matter and I suspect humanity might soon create highly intelligent forms of artificial life, potentially worth of human-level moral patienthood, but with radically different attitudes in society.
Conferences are a time-tested way to connect and develop a research community. I support further conferences on research into the potential sentience and moral patienthood of digital minds.
The conference was surprisingly cheap to fund! The conference organizers clearly care deeply about the cause areas they support, as they ran the event with no guaranteed funding.
Donor's main reservations
I don’t think that aligning early transformative AI systems with the interests of nonhumans is a good idea. I believe that the period during which transformative AI emerges will likely be fraught with risk and rapid societal change. I principally want to prevent catastrophic risk and value lock-in during this period and adding further complexity to the challenge of making AI corrigible to robust democratic institutions seems bad. I’d rather build corrigible AI to reduce catastrophic risk and prevent value lock-in, then proceed with a “long reflection” or other deep investigation into the all-things-considered best approach towards maximizing nonhuman flourishing within appropriate constraints (though I support efforts to improve animal welfare today).
I think that the conference organizers could have supported further researchers in AI sentience or moral patienthood, such as Robert Long, Patrick Butlin, or any of their coauthors here.
I think that the animal welfare aspects of the conference might make this project relatively easy for animal welfare donors to fund. It’s not clear to me why the conference organizers didn’t apply to EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund.
Process for deciding amount
I decided to fund the fraction of the project’s cost that went towards supporting sessions on AI sentience or moral patienthood, as opposed to using AI to further animal rights or facilitate interspecies communication. I estimated this from the ~1/4 of sessions focused on digital minds and rounded upwards: 1/4 * $5500 = $1375 ~ $1500. I don’t oppose using AI to improve interspecies communication or support animal welfare (both seem positive), but I prefer to dedicate my Manifund resources to projects where I am more counterfactual or impactful.
Conflicts of interest
I don't believe there are any conflicts of interest to declare.
Constance Li
2 months ago
@RyanKidd thank you for your donation and the thoughtful analysis of our work!
I was somewhat familiar with the tradeoffs between putting value constraints on AI and their general reasoning performance, but didn't know about the terminology of corrigibility and the long reflection. Bob Fisher's talk "Animal-friendly AI = Misaligned AI" during the conference was great for introducing this concept to the AIxAnimals community and it largely arose because of conversations he had during EAG London. I have since shared your comments with the AI Coalition channel on the Hive Slack and I think it has helped to establish some shared language with the AI Safety community.
FWIW I did try to get Rob Long as a speaker, but it didn't work out. I've since been talking more with Rob about whether or not it makes sense to mix discussions of animals and digital minds together.
Thanks for pointing out the EA Animal Welfare Fund (EA AWF). I had applied/inquired with 4 grantmakers in the EA/AI Safety/Animal Welfare spaces and didn't have much success. I was very over capacity at this time (and still am) and thought that given this past track record with grant makers and knowing from experience that the EA AWF application process is on the more time consuming side, the expected value of the work I put into applying would be quite low. I think once I have more capacity and hire a program lead for AI for Animals, I will consider submitting an application to EA AWF.
donated $2,000
Austin Chen
4 months ago
I asked Constance to post this project to Manifund after seeing her initial report on AIADM on the EA Forum. As someone who has organized a conference very recently, I liked her transparent reporting on the behind-the-scenes execution of this event, and recommend that to anyone who is interested in running events.
It also seems like a shame that this event did not receive any external funding, so that Constance had to pay for the whole thing out of her pocket. I'm impressed that she went ahead and organized this despite lack of funding; it speaks to her conviction in the importance of her work. Though I'm very new to and fairly agnostic about this particular field (AI x Animal Welfare), I'd like to help defray her costs and reward this kind of resourcefulness by retroactively supporting the event.
Constance Li
4 months ago
@Austin thanks for the encouragement to post on Manifund and for the cheering on the creation of the behind the scenes document. I actually almost didn't post that doc because I doubted anyone would be interested in it. Happy to know that isn't the case!