this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we'd force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of "nobody else's bill goes up"; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it's too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.
As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they've broken and resources they've stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let's say they didn't: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.
It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.
You could argue that this is the very nature of capitalism: theft because it always means owners extracting value from other people's work, and ultimately planet-scale destruction because it depends on infinite growth while externalizing (not paying for) the true costs of its activity.
In that sense, AI companies are just a faster-growing strain of the global cancer that is capitalism.
I find those terms acceptable.