The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) vegetarian advocacy group has a paper out arguing that common broiler chickens not only learn more than the obvious, like which bowl has food, they get happier learning.
Their marketing of the paper suggests they know who their key demographic is; middle-aged wealthy white women. And if you want them, you invoke "The Gilmore Girls", a show about a genius single mother with an equally intelligent daughter and they are best friends and talk really fast and use a lot of Proust references.
The experiment is more interesting than the marketing. It's not science the way you might think of science, “judgment bias tests” of chickens are even less rigorous than the surveys of psychology undergraduates that pass for human psychology papers, and they paid to publish it, but it's interesting. The chickens learned quickly, as anything with anything remotely resembling cognitive abilities does, that a black bowl had food and a white one did not, or the opposite. So the authors put a gray bowl in there to confuse them. If the chicken went up to the bowl quickly (subjectively decided by the human vegetarians) it was deemed optimistic, if it was slower it was pessimistic.
Okay, fine, the fun was their estimated of how chicken "moods" changed when they learned to access food. They found that chickens learned how to access a treat, they had increased optimism. And that the authors assured us the chickens were "given a choice" to participate. I'd love to have been there when the Institutional Review Board read their consent forms.
Chickens are learning better than supposed "AI" tools like artspace.ai, which can't even do something simple without giving humans six fingers and legs sticking out of their chests.
It's 20 "rescue" chickens so confounders are many but we're in a month where people believe there are ghosts and vampires and that a full moon can make some act crazier. In a year when people think organic food uses no pesticides and solar and wind power can replace conventional energy without killing off 6 billion people. People believe in UFOs and that high inflation was caused by evil capitalists and not printing off $4 trillion to give to government employees to give to their friends and political tribe mates.
In that cultural milieu, artisanal small batch data of rescue chickens isn't all that crazy.
Halloween Horror Science: Are Chickens That Learn A Bigger Threat To Us Than AI?
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