Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) is increasingly integrated into people's daily lives. While it is known that AI perpetuates biases against marginalized human groups, their impact on non-human animals remains understudied. We found that ChatGPT's text-to-image model (DALL-E 3) introduces a strong bias toward romanticizing livestock farming as dairy cows on pasture and pigs rooting in mud. This bias remained when we requested realistic depictions and was only mitigated when the automatic prompt revision was inhibited. Most farmed animal in industrialized countries are reared indoors with limited space per animal, which fail to resonate with societal values. Inhibiting prompt revision resulted in images that more closely reflected modern farming practices; for example, cows housed indoors accessing feed through metal headlocks, and pigs behind metal railings on concrete floors in indoor facilities. While OpenAI introduced prompt revision to mitigate bias, in the case of farmed animal production systems, it paradoxically introduces a strong bias towards unrealistic farming practices.

Like humans, pigs have idiosyncratic faces, and new players in the Chinese pork market are taking notice, experimenting with increasingly sophisticated versions of facial recognition software for pigs. China is the world's largest exporter of pork, and is set to increase production next year by 9%. As the nation's pork farms grow in scale, more farmers are turning to AI systems like facial recognition technology – known as FRT – to continuously monitor, identify, and even feed their herds. This automated style of farming has the potential to be safer, cheaper and generally more effective: In 2018, pig farmers in China's Guangxi province trialling FRT found that it slashed costs, cut down on breeding time, and improved welfare outcomes for the pigs themselves. But it also has the potential to leave behind independent, small-scale farmers, who cannot afford to introduce this kind of technology to their operations.

Late autumn is the time for making lap yuk, a type of preserved pork that is a local speciality, and across town I would often spot slabs of meat hanging from high-rise apartment balconies, tied up with string and swaying next to shirts and sheets left out to dry. To make lap yuk, a piece of raw pork belly is soaked in a blend of rice wine, salt, soy sauce and spices, then hung out to cure in the damp, cold autumn air. The fat becomes translucent and imparts a savoury-sweet taste to any stir-fried vegetable dish. A relative of mine claims that only southern China can make preserved pork like this. The secret is the native spores and bacteria that are carried on the wind there. Guangzhou was the first stop on a journey I was taking in order to try to understand how artificial intelligence is transforming China's pork industry. The country is the world's largest producer of pork, and the story of how it has ramped up production in recent years to feed its growing middle class is sometimes described as "China's pork miracle".

The scene in your mind's eye is likely set in a rural area with farmhands doing back-breaking work. Hundreds of pigs are raised together, perhaps in a cramped space: they eat, they sleep, they play, they breed; and when the time comes, they are sent to the slaughterhouse by the truckload. But the nature of pig farms is changing in China. Some of the country's biggest names in the tech industry–Alibaba, JD–are lining up to become disruptors of this traditional business. In late 2017, Laozhang's family pig farm in a Beijing suburb received an unusual group of visitors--20 engineers from JD Finance's artificial intelligence (AI) department.

China's biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs, too. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, and JD.com, its rival, are using cameras to track pigs' faces. Alibaba also uses voice-recognition software to monitor their coughs. Many in China are quick to embrace high-tech solutions to just about any problem. A digital revolution has transformed China into a place where nearly anything -- financial services, spicy takeout, manicures and dog grooming, to name a few -- can be summoned with a smartphone.

As China's largest news network Xinhua reported, a new deal worth millions of yuan has been signed between livestock farming companies the Sichuan Tequ Group, the Dekon Group and Alibaba, China's technology giant. This united approach has the goal of identifying and predicting fertility by analysing swine behaviour. The system should be able to keep a record of every single pig, including their breed, age in days, diet, weight and movement. The system is said to be able to help each sow give birth to 3 more piglets per year and reduce the mortality rate by around 3%, according to an early-stage experiment. Tequ Group's chief information officer, Zhang Haifeng, told Xinhua: "If you have 10 million pigs to raise, you can barely count how many piglets were born on a daily basis when the due date comes."

Provided by Quartz Pigs are seen on a family farm in Xiaoxinzhuang village, Hebei province Alibaba is best known-as China's largest e-commerce company, but it's lately made forays into artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Through a program it calls ET Brain, it's using AI to improve traffic and city planning, increase airport efficiency, and diagnose illness. The company's latest AI foray is taking place among pigs. Alibaba's Cloud Unit signed an agreement on Feb. 6 with the Tequ Group, a Chinese food-and-agriculture conglomerate that raises about 10 million pigs each year (link in Chinese), to deploy facial and voice recognition on Tequ's pig farms. According to an Alibaba representative, the company will offer software to Tequ that it will deploy on its farms with its own hardware.

Alibaba is best known-as China's largest e-commerce company, but it's lately made forays into artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Through a program it calls ET Brain, it's using AI to improve traffic and city planning, increase airport efficiency, and diagnose illness. The company's latest AI foray is taking place among pigs. Alibaba's Cloud Unit signed an agreement on Feb. 6 with the Tequ Group, a Chinese food-and-agriculture conglomerate that raises about 10 million pigs each year (link in Chinese), to deploy facial and voice recognition on Tequ's pig farms. According to an Alibaba representative, the company will offer software to Tequ that it will deploy on its farms with its own hardware.

Artificial intelligence technology has been developed to help piglets survive their first months - and then to decide which sows to kill. The scheme is being rolled out in China, the world's biggest producer and consumer of pork. It marks the latest deployment of tech giant Alibaba's ET Brain cloud computing service. China's pig industry is notoriously inefficient, but one expert said the tech could also prove useful elsewhere. For now, the trial is limited to the country's Sichuan province. Alibaba teamed up with local feed provider Sichuan Tequ and the farming group Dekon to develop the solution.