How I Learned to Love Shrimp Thomas Manandhar-Richardson on why animal advocates need to use AI more (and how)
Oct 14, 2026
Thomas “Richie” Manandhar-Richardson, an animal advocate, technologist, and researcher with Vegan Hacktivists, explores AI’s practical potential for the animal movement. They discuss automating research, meeting preparation, data analysis, and creative work, plus tools that help non-coders build useful workflows. The conversation also tackles human oversight, privacy, fabricated imagery, cascading errors, and making AI systems more animal-friendly.
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AI Enables Efficiency And New Campaigns
- AI offers both efficiency gains and entirely new opportunities for animal advocates.
- It can make projects feasible that previously required impossible levels of human monitoring or labor.
AI Scales Greener By Default’s Food Analysis
- Greener by Default uses AI to classify messy catering data and calculate environmental impacts at scale.
- The system recognizes abbreviations like “dbl ch h ch kn bgr” as double chicken burgers and converts varied measurements into comparable units.
Context Is The Key To Better AI
- Give AI extensive personal and professional context before judging its usefulness.
- Populate memory with your role, location, organization, colleagues, and needs so research and drafting become appropriately tailored.
