In the age of AI, we must protect human creativity as a natural resource arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0…

Op-ed: As AI outputs flood the Internet, diverse human perspectives are our most valuable 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.

Aggressive AI crawlers already effectively function as denial-of-service attacks on certain sites, with Cloudflare documenting GPTBot’s immediate impact on traffic patterns. Beyond infrastructure strain, our information environment also shows signs of degradation. Google has publicly acknowledged rising volumes of “spammy, low-quality,” often auto-generated content appearing in search results.

This downward spiral of AI pollution may soon resemble a classic “tragedy of the commons,” in which organizations act from self-interest at the expense of shared resources. If AI developers continue extracting data without limits or meaningful contributions, the shared resource of human creativity could eventually degrade for everyone.