René Itah and I are building a public platform to track incidents of AI-caused harm to non-human animals. Some examples of these harms include autonomous vehicles hitting animals on roads, smart home systems creating unsafe conditions for companion animals, and robots interfering with nesting and migratory patterns in wildlife.
Our design ingests data from multiple different sources and uses an LLM to detect instances of AI-caused harm to non-human animals. These instances are then reviewed by a human prior to publication on a publicly accessible dashboard. We want to build this with input from people already working on AI+animal welfare, so if this is a space you care about, we’d love your take.
AI systems increasingly make decisions that affect animals, but there's no central place tracking when those systems cause harm. Reporting spans a variety of sources from news reports to mandatory reporting (ex. NHTSA) to research papers. Some AI incident databases already exist, like the legal hallucinations database and AIID, but nothing that focuses on non-human animals. A centralized record of these incidents would equip researchers, advocates, and policymakers to identify patterns, prioritize interventions, and hold system owners accountable.
We’d very much appreciate your feedback either in the comments below or by email.
