Advances in LLMs have raised questions about how these systems reflect and reproduce human moral judgments. In our new study, published in Nature Communications and nicely summarized in this article, we investigate whether LLMs exhibit speciesism, the tendency to assign lower moral worth to specific species, especially to “farm animals”. We examine this question across three types of evaluation and find that, while LLMs reflect a mix of progressive and mainstream human views, they nevertheless reproduce deeply ingrained cultural norms surrounding 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.
