AI ethics: the case for including animals

Abstract:

The Ethics of Artificial intelligence, or AI ethics, is a rapidly growing feld, and rightly so. While the range of issues and groups of stakeholders concerned by the feld 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 afected by AI, but are rarely mentioned within the feld 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 feld of philosophical and technical research regarding the impacts of AI on animals, namely, the ethics of AI as it afects nonhuman animals.