Speciesism in AI: Evaluating Discrimination Against Animals in Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper investigates speciesist bias in large language models, revealing they often accept speciesist attitudes, rationalize harm to farmed animals, and reflect cultural norms, highlighting the need to include non-human moral considerations in AI fairness.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework to evaluate speciesism in LLMs, combining benchmarks, psychological measures, and text-generation analysis, revealing biases and rationalizations.

Findings

LLMs detect speciesist statements but rarely condemn them.

Models show mixed responses on moral evaluations compared to humans.

LLMs rationalize harm to farmed animals more than non-farmed animals.

Abstract

As large language models (LLMs) become more widely deployed, it is crucial to examine their ethical tendencies. Building on research on fairness and discrimination in AI, we investigate whether LLMs exhibit speciesist bias -- discrimination based on species membership -- and how they value non-human animals. We systematically examine this issue across three paradigms: (1) SpeciesismBench, a 1,003-item benchmark assessing recognition and moral evaluation of speciesist statements; (2) established psychological measures comparing model responses with those of human participants; (3) text-generation tasks probing elaboration on, or resistance to, speciesist rationalizations. In our benchmark, LLMs reliably detected speciesist statements but rarely condemned them, often treating speciesist attitudes as morally acceptable. On psychological measures, results were mixed: LLMs expressed slightly lower explicit speciesism than people, yet in direct trade-offs they more often chose to save one human over multiple animals. A tentative interpretation is that LLMs may weight cognitive capacity rather than species per se: when capacities were equal, they showed no species preference, and when an animal was described as more capable, they tended to prioritize it over a less capable human. In open-ended text generation tasks, LLMs frequently normalized or rationalized harm toward farmed animals while refusing to do so for non-farmed animals. These findings suggest that while LLMs reflect a mixture of progressive and mainstream human views, they nonetheless reproduce entrenched cultural norms around animal exploitation. We argue that expanding AI fairness and alignment frameworks to explicitly include non-human moral patients is essential for reducing these biases and preventing the entrenchment of speciesist attitudes in AI systems and the societies they influence.