Project Incubator

This project is centered on the Ψ Interspecific Affect GPT, an experimental AI tool developed by the Welfare Footprint Institute to support interspecific affective comparisons within the Welfare Footprint Framework. The tool is available through WFI’s AI Tools and Applications page. The scientific rationale, methodological approach, and current workflow are described in this article. The initial focus is on provisional, evidence-informed hypotheses about the maximum plausible intensity of Pain that members of selected animal taxa may be capable of experiencing, expressed relative to human-anchored reference categories. These estimates concern potential affective capacity, not the intensity that animals ordinarily experience. For each taxon, the tool produces an explicit reasoning dossier addressing taxonomic scope, the plausibility of sentience, relevant neurobiological, behavioral, cognitive, pharmacological, evolutionary, and ecological evidence, competing hypotheses, arguments against the preliminary conclusion, uncertainty, a provisional affective-capacity ceiling, and priorities for further research. The project would test both the substantive interspecific conclusions and the broader research workflow. Expected outputs could include:

• critically audited dossiers for approximately three to five selected taxa;
• a structured dataset recording AI claims, citation checks, errors, omissions, human corrections, and unresolved uncertainties;
• an analysis of recurrent AI failure modes and variation across repeated runs;
• recommendations for improving the tool’s instructions, evidence standards, knowledge base, and evaluation protocol; and
• depending on the maturity of the results, a technical report, preprint, academic manuscript, EA Forum post, or a combination of these.

Build, help others build, and help advertise interactive experiences that inspire wonder. This is part of an AI Safety Museum Exhibition project.

• We're a team of 10 volunteers.
• There’s room for machine consciousness and animal welfare projects as well.
• See CivAI’s We Need to Talk for inspiration.

I am a PhD student working on global environmental land use modelling and integrating animal welfare into the models. Additionally, I am working with researchers from Wageningen University to create a benchmark for large language models to assess their behavior and attitude towards animals.

The project involves jumping on opportunities as they emerge, so exact details will come in due time. We are doing whatever we can to reduce friction and incentivize frontier labs to address animal welfare in their alignment training. This includes a technical component (benchmarks and training data) as well as a social component.

👤 This project is co-mentored by Henrike Gätjens. To apply, select only Philip Kratz as mentor.

Create an engaging, interactive info website in German, with the first goal of making knowledge about AI×Animals accessible to a German-speaking audience. Later, we might extend this into field-building and in-person meetings/summits. The website should:

• Showcase positive and negative scenarios, chances and risks for nh animals through AI
• Be catchy, picturesque, precise and informative

A lot of research into digital welfare first asks whether the systems have "the right stuff" (recurrent processing, global workspaces, higher-order representations) to be conscious, then get mired in intractable debates between theories of consciousness and its consciousness. I'm excited for research on a more literal reading of "what it's like": drawing a detailed picture of a system's Umwelt—environmental sensitivities, goal-seeking, adaptation, teleosemantics, the whole physical and functional picture. I think this is a promising research agenda for three reasons:

1. There are good reasons to believe that experiences do not have private, intrinsic, ineffable, directly apprehensible properties. (cf. Frankish, "Illusionism as a theory of consciousness"; Dennett, "Quining Qualia"; Frankish, "Quining Diet Qualia") In that case, what most "consciousness research" is looking for does not exist, and is therefore unlikely to be fruitful. However, since experiences are still morally relevant (pain hurts!), what is therefore morally relevant is whatever remains: the functional, physical properties.
2. Even if private, intrinsic, etc. properties do exist, they are tightly bound up with our Umwelten. For instance, our experiences rely on our senses, our wants come from our selective pressures, etc. So Umwelt research is likely to be fruitful even in these other worlds.
3. Umwelt research is empirically tractable, whereas "consciousness research" is often (a) very confused about what it's looking for, or (b) looking for something which by definition is inaccessible to science.

I'm happy to advise both theoretical and empirical research on this agenda. Here are some ambitious project ideas (the incubator project would likely be much more small-scoped than this!):

• Example of a theoretical project in this domain: a minimum viable product for hedonium
  • Even if your project is empirical, you should read the linked article to understand the underlying approach better! In the article, I apply the term "Umwelt" restrictively to only one of the five bullet points; for projects, I mean it liberally, to apply to all of the five and related subjects within the same philosophical outlook.
  • Other ideas: the personal identity relation of an LLM, what is it like to be a role-player, how do autoregressive generators perceive time, etc.
• Examples of empirical projects: work along the lines of Anthropic's functional emotions, Chalmers' functional welfare, AISI's machinic psychopharmacology

Desired product looks like a detailed blog post or preprint.