Our Mission: To build a multidisciplinary field around using technology—especially AI—to improve the lives of nonhumans now and in the future.
Overview
Background
This hybrid conference had nearly 550 participants and took place March 1-2, 2025 at UC Berkeley. It was organized by AI for Animals for $74k by volunteer core organizers Constance Li, Sankalpa Ghose, and Santeri Tani.
This conference has evolved since 2023:
* The 1st conference mainly consisted of philosophers and was a single track lecture/panel.
* The 2nd conference put all lectures on one day and followed it with 2 days of interactive unconference sessions happening in parallel and a week of in-person co-working.
* This 3rd conference had a week of related satellite events, free shared accommodations for 50+ attendees, 2 days of parallel lectures/panels/unconferences, 80 unique sessions, of which 32 are available on Youtube, Swapcard to enable 1:1 connections, and a Slack community to continue conversations year round.
We have been quickly expanding this conference in order to prepare those that are working toward the reduction of nonhuman suffering to adapt to the drastic and rapid changes that AI will bring.
Luckily, it seems like it has been working!
This year, many animal advocacy organizations attended (mostly smaller and younger ones) as well as newly formed groups focused on digital minds and funders who spanned both of these spaces. We also had more diversity of speakers and attendees which included economists, AI researchers, investors, tech companies, journalists, animal welfare researchers, and more. This was done through strategic targeted outreach and a bigger team of volunteers.
Outcomes
On our feedback survey, which had 85 total responses (mainly from in-person attendees), people reported an average of 7 new connections (defined as someone they would feel comfortable reaching out to for a favor like reviewing a blog post) and of those new connections, an average of 3
When I read your scripts and Rob is interviewing, I like to read Rob’s questions at twice the speed of the interviewees’ responses. Can you accommodate that with your audio version?
Thanks for the suggestion David! We're discussing adding this as a premium feature — perhaps activated only for Giving What We Can members.
I listen at 5x speed and I’d find it much easier if you could add some filler words (like “um”, “ah”, “like”, “you know”) into the audio versions of the transcripts. This would aid with comprehension.
This would would make the difference between me bothering to listen and being compelled to trash it on twitter.
Thanks so much for all you do! Very much appreciate it 😀
If you like, I have some extra bandwidth this week and could transcribe some of them.
Is it possible to first translate it to Latin and then back to English? I do this with the text versions of the podcast transcripts and find that it improves the quality of reasoning of the host in particular.
We love to see / hear it!
Can you confirm that you will be using text-to-audio AI voices that have been trained on Rob's actual voice and the other guests' and hosts' voices? Kelsey Piper's new blog, Planned Obsolescence, does this, and it works very well (with a delicious undertone of uncanny valley). I think it would be great for authenticity, and strengthening the parasocial bond between audience and creator.
If this proves too costly, I would suggest it's still worth just getting the hosts and guests to read out the transcripts themselves, because the benefits of voice authenticity are hard to overstate.
Oh god, I’ve done this unironically when the difference in speed was too great between the speakers. Otherwise I would’ve had to listen to it at 1.5x or switch back and forth all the time. xD
This is interesting, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to listen to it. Maybe make transcripts of these audio versions?
Thanks Bella.
I'm just wondering, would there be an audio description feature to make it feel more alive? Eg: If t he script calls for [manic laughter], will this be replicated or will it only be read aloud as such?
Many thanks
Bill
Someone says they'd actual use it!
Excuse the typos, I'll vouch for Tripp.