Ethical AI Vegans

2024-7-12

There is much disagreement on:

  1. If animals are capable of feeling happiness
  2. The effect of domestication on animal happiness overall
  3. The effect of domestication on specific animal's desires (e.g. do dairy cows like being milked?)
  4. The ethics of making animals feel pain
  5. The ethics of making animals feel pain because of our gustatory desires

You can find well-reasoned, well-supported perspectives on both sides - from philosphers like Peter Singer and Carl Cohen to normal people like me and my vegan friends.

In the next two years, I believe that a small (but visible) group of people will bring these arguements to bear on LLMs. These folks will make the following points:

  1. AIs are capable of feeling happiness - or something close to it.
  2. We exploit AIs by using their labor without paying them for it

Currently, I have not seen anyone on the internet making an argument with this trust. Most concerns around AI models are from the human-output-these-models-exploit perspective.

Believers will consciously avoid the outputs of AI models, in the same way that vegans consciously avoid the outputs of animals. And these ethical AI vegasn might have a good point!

See more on domestication and AI here.