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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…. 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…. 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?