Artificial intelligence is being applied to animal welfare monitoring, disease detection, and advocacy strategy. Understanding both the genuine opportunities and the risks of AI in this field is important for welfare advocates.
AI offers genuine welfare improvements through early detection, consistent monitoring, and scale that human observation cannot match. However, the technology is only as good as its training data and deployment context. Systems trained on poor welfare conditions may normalise them. Automated monitoring could be used to reduce human presence on farms, removing the human judgment that catches unusual situations no algorithm was trained to detect. The most promising applications pair AI monitoring with strong human oversight and genuine institutional commitment to welfare improvement.