Benj Edwards writing for Ars Technica presents an intriguing analogy, comparing creativity to a finite natural resource like forests and explaining how early AI models could have a long lasting effect on creativity and its ultimate destruction.
Today, the AI industry’s business models unintentionally echo the ways in which early industrialists approached forests and fisheries—as free inputs to exploit without considering ecological limits.
Just as pollution from early factories unexpectedly damaged the environment, AI systems risk polluting the digital environment by flooding the Internet with synthetic content. Like a forest that needs careful management to thrive or a fishery vulnerable to collapse from overexploitation, the creative ecosystem can be degraded even if the potential for imagination remains.
Depleting our creative diversity may become one of the hidden costs of AI, but that diversity is worth preserving. If we let AI systems deplete or pollute the human outputs they depend on, what happens to AI models—and ultimately to human society—over the long term?
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