Epistemic Harms

"Indirect harms may occur when AI promotes or reinforces attitudes that animals have no moral significance. Although this may immediately harm animals too and be hard to predict, consolidation of anthropocentricism may harm future animals, perhaps on a grand scale. We call these harms epistemic harms, since they affect how we understand and regard animals."(p. 20)

"It is already well-known that AI can cause representational harms to humans (Buddemeyer et al., 2021). Representational harms involve conveying factually or morally false views that embody or engender insufficient ethical respect. ‘Representation bias’ occurs, for example, in ML using a training sample that ‘underrepresents some part of the [target] population, and subsequently fails to generalize well for a subset of the use population’ (Suresh & Guttag, 2021, p. 4)."(p. 21)