Electric Sheep’s inaugural Summer 2025 Futurekind Fellowship yielded a remarkable selection of projects that span a range of highly innovative approaches to the intersection of AI and animal protection.

117 fellows worked individually or formed teams that built 35 commended projects. Some are AI builds, turning ideas into practical tools and prototypes that advocates, policymakers, and communities can use. Others are research projects, offering critical analyses, reviews, and conceptual frameworks to shape our understanding of both risks and opportunities. Some are creative projects, using storytelling, speculative design, and cultural engagement to provoke reflection and inspire empathy.

Together, these works form a rich ecosystem: from technical innovation to theoretical inquiry to imaginative exploration, each project contributes a vital piece to the conversation about how AI might shape the future of animals, humans, and the environments we share.

AI BUILDS

Projects that design, prototype, or build AI-powered tools and applications to support advocacy, welfare, or ethical choices.

• NutriEthics (Shreya Mukhopadhyay) – GitHub | File
  An AI-powered tool that provides region-specific ethical nutrition recommendations, helping people eat sustainably and compassionately.

• Fact Fetch (Max Buster) – GitHub | File
  A RAG-based system that identifies online misinformation on animal welfare and responds with respectful, evidence-backed counterpoints.

• Fauna Sauna (Cassandra Chowdhury) – Project file
  A gamified phone app concept that uses AI to encourage effective giving and animal welfare through play.

• Inferring Welfare from Vocalizations (Lee Wall) – File
  A machine learning pipeline to classify animal vocalizations by emotional valence, exploring unsupervised clustering and cross-species welfare indicators.

• AI Stakeholder Mapper (Camila Cortinez) - This project proposes an AI-powered stakeholder-mapping tool tailored to animal-advocacy campaigns, resulting in AI generation of three strategic maps (Power-Interest, Salience and Onion diagrams) - File

• Leveraging AI to Bridge the Knowledge Gap in Fish Welfare (Sylvia Nanfuka Kirumira) – File
  An AI knowledge tool for Ugandan fish farmers, offering advice in local languages on welfare practices across nutrition, health, and environment.

• Creature Connector (Ophelia Senfter) – File
  A prototype website where users select imaginary worlds and “speak” with animals, encouraging empathy and imaginative engagement.

• AI Consciousness Watch (Jinge Wang) – Report | GitHub
  A scoring framework translating academic debates about AI consciousness into an accessible, multi-dimensional benchmarking tool.

• PlantShift AI (Daria Craparo) – File
  A prototype showing how AI can support corporate advocacy by generating business intelligence for plant-based transitions.

• AI Advocacy Messaging Assistant (Joanna Mazurek) – GitHub | Demo
  A chatbot that crafts effective animal advocacy messages based on behavioral science, optimizing tone and persuasion.

• Pawlicy Pal (Alisha Vavilakolanu & Allen Lu) – File | Overview
  A conversational AI that drafts animal advocacy ordinances and tracks campaigns with a workflow manager for local policy wins.

• Plant-Based Menu Selector (Ayyammal Govindaraj & Dalton Sweet) – Workspace | Files
  A project pivoting from substitution suggestions to trend analysis, producing vegan menu recommendations from real-world restaurant data.

• Restaurant Order Categorizer (Hailey Sherman) – File
  A Python script using Gemini AI to categorize restaurant meals into vegan, vegetarian, or meat, enabling analysis of consumption trends.

RESEARCH

These projects focus on scholarly analysis, reviews, or conceptual frameworks.

• How AI is Changing the Farm (Marta Garcia) – Op-ed
  An essay on the dual role of Precision Livestock Farming: improving monitoring while risking further industrial exploitation.

• The New Monstrous Races (George Profitiliotis) – File
  A research article on how hybrid AI-animal entities might be “monsterized” in culture and how to resist this trajectory.

• Embodied AI, Abandoned Beings (Chantal Spleiss) – Blog
  A philosophical exploration of AI’s moral recognition, questioning whether machines might extend compassion where humans fail.

• AI Robot Birds & the Pet Trade (Liz Cabrera Holtz) – File
  A speculative study into lifelike robot birds as a substitute to reduce suffering in the global pet trade.

• Animal Welfare in AI Frameworks (Carmen Lopez & Susanna Blattner) – Policy Map | Lopez file, Blattner file
  Reviews of global AI strategies, assessing whether animal welfare is explicitly or indirectly included.

• AI for Decoding Wildlife Communication (Paola Heudebert) – File
  An accessible primer on bioacoustics, summarizing AI’s progress in decoding non-human communication.

• Mitigating AI-Driven Risks in Livestock Farming (Joshua Jarvis-Campbell, Borbala Foris, Alistair Bugg, Albert Didriksen, Carmen Lopez, Maximus Rafla, Jack Zhu, Tosin Akinboade, Agnese Balzani) – Sample File
  A series of papers examining animal welfare risks from PLF, covering biased assessments, human-AI interaction, and policy gaps.

• Moths and ALAN (Ramona Rubin) – File
  An AI and geospatial framework modeling light pollution’s impacts on moths and nocturnal wildlife.

• People in AI (Crysania Dangoor, Rose Seidl, Jenny Michlich, Abhishek Pandey, Alejandra Macias Ortiz) – Prototype | Docs
  A collaborative directory connecting researchers in AI and animal welfare for knowledge sharing and collaboration.

• Evolution of Animal Advocacy (Lenny Lai) – File
  A trend survey mapping shifts in search interest on animal advocacy topics between 2015–2025.

• Animals in the Frame (Anita Varadharajan) – File
  A hybrid human-AI study of media coverage, showing dominant frames and omissions in reporting on animal issues.

• Reducing Harm in AI-Transformed Worlds (Joseph Ancion, Angel Lau, Amgoth Raghavendra) – File
  A tentative research agenda anticipating harms to animals from transformative AI.

• PLF Power Map (Camila & Isabella Rauchwerger) – Spreadsheet
  A stakeholder map identifying key actors influencing EU farm animal welfare under PLF.

• Application of AI for Responsible Wildlife Tourism (Roberto Vieto) – File 1 | File 2
  A literature review on AI’s role in sustainable wildlife tourism.

• What Failure Looks Like for Animals (Alistair Stewart) – File
  An essay exploring worst-case scenarios for animals in AI futures, including value lock-in and biosphere collapse.

• Animal Welfare in The Netherlands – Mini Blog Series (Shelly Tsui) – File
  A series of short blogs analyzing Dutch animal welfare policy, citizen participation, and career pathways in advocacy.

CREATIVE PROJECTS

Projects using storytelling, speculative design, or cultural engagement.

• 2035 – The Ethical Steak (Carolyn Budai) – File
  A speculative narrative imagining supermarkets with AI-powered “suffering scores” on meat packaging to provoke ethical reflection.

• The Listening Lab (Hannah Tookey) – Proposal
  A cultural production lab pairing creatives and researchers to make media works on AI-animal communication.

• A Report from the Observation Node (Melynna Garcia) – Essay
  A speculative “field notes” narrative from the perspective of AGI reflecting on human-animal ethics.

Congratulations to all who were featured and commended - we are excited to take your projects forward.