In the age of AI, we must protect human creativity as a natural resource

Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum.

Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.

A limited resource

By ingesting billions of creations, chatbots learn to talk, and image synthesizers learn to draw. Along the way, the AI companies behind them treat our shared culture like an inexhaustible resource to be strip-mined, with little thought for the consequences.

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