From Bot-Farm to For-You-Page Fork: Consuming The Whole Digital Animal

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

In 2022, OpenAI launched the Large Language Model ChatGPT, and with it, the possibility of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) as a creative partner. Progress in the genAI arena has been rapid, with genAI created media going from uncanny horror show, to being able to create realistic media from a prompt. Social Media ‘for you page’ algorithms are now serving their users content created by genAI, including digital animals which may behave very unlike real animals do. The field of animal welfare science has utilised policy frameworks such as ‘Farm-to-Fork’ to conceptualise where harms and sustainability opportunities exist within the animal production system. In this work, we utilise three common ethical approaches to animal use, utilitarianism, deontological ethics, and the principle of telos, to explore the production and consumption of digital animals on social media. Using the example of an object animal (a toy), a digital animal (a genAI created cat), and an embodied animal (a real cat in a teaching programme), we explore the evidence for their effect on the human-animal relationship, and how various ethical frameworks would consider their consumption. We conclude with three recommendations for social media companies for incorporating digital animal media in their provisions. First, digital animal creation should be limited, with similar style guard-rails to creation of media containing humans. Second, digital animal media should be fully disclosed, to minimise risk of misinformation and norm creep. Third, as with content regarding ‘kid influencers’, ‘animal influencer’ content should be demonetised, to reduce the risk of exploitation.