AI Is Not Just Colonising Our Creativity, Knowledge & Data But Our Land, Water & Energy Too

You don't need to be a Star Wars nerd to know, in 2025, that empires are generally considered a bad thing. And yet, AI and the companies behind it are showing all the hallmarks of imperialism; stealing our resources - both digital and physical - and flattening our cultures because the emperors, including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, believe they know better than us savages.

It doesn’t start as imperialism

The British Empire began not as an imperialist dream but as an entrepreneurial one called the British East India Company, which merely wanted to "trade" in commodities such as cotton, silk, sugar, salt, spice and tea. But, as its wealth grew so did it's power and, as they say, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Eventually the British took over the political systems of its colonies and even tried to impose its dominant religion upon its subjects, which they did not appreciate. It also extracted wealth at unimaginable scale. In India alone we helped ourselves to something like $45 trillion of national assets and I would argue something similar is happening now.

The AI oligarchs see the world, its collective knowledge, creativity and data - amassed and recorded over millennia - as free raw materials to which it is entitled. For instance, Meta unilaterally decided that 7 million books had no economic value so deemed if fine to steal the content to train the models for its new business, Meta AI, which allows users to generate “new” content which they can sell or otherwise use for commercial gain. OpenAI scrapes web pages 1,700 times for free content and repays the creators with one referral, Anthropic does it at a rate of 73,000:1. One major sports site reportedly got 13 million AI-bot visits per month but received just 600 human users and since Google launched its AI Overview, referrals from the world's biggest search engine are down 30-70%. This is quite literally taking money out of the mouths of artists, academics, journalists, publishers, musicians, filmmakers and creators, it is wealth extraction at an imperial scale disguised as entrepreneurship and it's not sustainable.

Broke governments ❤ billionaires

One might look to governments, who must surely be terrified at the prospect of mass theft, not to mention job losses, and the consequent reduction in tax receipts and increase in welfare claims, to impose some kind of restraint - but no. The AI giants have already amassed so much money that they can buy their way into the corridors of power and whisper their implausible visions of an AI-funded future into the ears of power.

Politicians ❤ Broligarchs

The result? Trump attempted to sneak a 10-year moratorium on ANY AI regulation into his 'big beautiful bill', which was thankfully voted down 99-1 by the Senate. However, in the UK, the government's Data Use and Access Bill (DUA) passed in June WITHOUT the provision proposed by the House of Lords that would compel AI companies to get permission and/or pay for UK content used in its training models and outputs. (The government has claimed it will tackle this topic in the future AI and copyright legislation—after the conclusion of a consultation on the topic in February. We'll see...)

The AI oligarchs insist that they couldn't possibly identify and compensate all copyright holders because, in the words of the former UK deputy Prime Minister, and subsequent President of Global Affairs for Meta (I know 🤦‍♂)…

“Requiring artists’ permission before using their works to train AI models … would be absolutely unworkable given the massive volumes of data involved,” and doing so nationally “could cripple the country’s AI sector.”

Nick Clegg, Boot Licker

Funny how requiring hundreds of billions of dollars worth of land, water, electricity and GPUs won't cripple the country's AI's sector, but paying artists will!

They may take our land…and probably will

That brings me to the second obvious parallel with colonialism and that is the extraction not just of intellectual property but physical property and resources. AI, which it is often claimed will help us find the solution to climate change, is the most water and energy intensive technology ever invented and the impacts of that are being felt in very real ways.

The BBC reported this week from the home of Beverly Morris in rural Georgia. Meta has built a data centre 400 yards from her house where the water pressure has now reduced to a trickle of visibly polluted slurry as the data centre sucks up every ounce of moisture to cool its core. Meta, of course, claims that the two aren't connected but having recently finished Sarah Wynne-Williams exposé of the company, ‘Careless People’, I'm not inclined to believe them.

According to a report by the World Economic Forum, "By 2027, global AI demand is expected to account for 1.1 to 1.7 trillion gallons of water withdrawal, more than 4-6 times the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark." Meanwhile, 2.2 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water services...IN 2025!

AI energy demands have also spiked this year with data centres consuming around 485 terawatt-hours of electricity globally, equivalent to 1.7% of total energy demand with that number set to double by 2032. Is it any wonder your energy bills are so high?

Elon Musk was so impatient to build his 750,000 square foot xAI Colossus cluster (that’s over 9 soccer / 13 American football pitches), that he installed an allegedly illegal array of 35 methane-powered turbines that emit massive amounts of nitrous oxides that are impacting the health of residents in the historically black neighbourhoods surrounding the facility.

Like the imperialists of old these men (and they are all men), are marching into countries, counties and neighbourhoods, planting their flags and claiming the land, water, air and energy for their own and only they seem to benefit because, once the construction is done, there are almost no jobs created by these largely automated facilities.

And what has all this empire building done for us so far? For all the claims to the good the only evidence I’ve seen is a massive rise in AI slop, AI scams, AI image-based sexual abuse and an increasing number of job losses, particularly at the entry-level. Oh, and yes, it’s made transcribing a little easier for me and I can scan my receipts now. So that’s good.

Solutions are emerging

These problems seem epic in scale and governments move slowly but there is evidence of companies, some connected to AI giants, who are innovating at speed to solve these emerging problems.

Just this week YouTube, which is owned by the same company as Google, announced that it will crackdown on ‘mass-produced’ and ‘repetitive’ videos from July 15th as part of a bid to curb AI slop. The approach, at least according to this video by YouTube’s Head of Editorial & Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie, appears appropriate and nuanced and we can only hope it helps redirect audiences, and revenues, to creators of original and authentic content.

Additionally, I dived deeper into Cloudflare’s announcement last week that they have started blocking AI bots from customer websites by default. Not only does this make AI training opt-in rather than opt-out, they have also introduce Pay-Per-Crawl, a protocol that allows content creators and copyright owners to charge AI bots every time they want to use their content to train on or serve up to users. This has massive potential to replace lost revenue and align the interests of content creators and AI models. And just yesterday I spoke to an entrepreneur developing a system to redistribute hot water from data centres to schools, hospitals and hotels in Africa.

As I always say, I’m not anti-tech I am just pro-human and my goal is not just to expose the problems but also the solutions that will enable us all to reap the benefits of technology and avoid the pitfalls. I hope you’ll stick with me as I go in search of the people and organisations tackling these most pressing of issues. Got a tip? Get in touch with me at neal@mooreslore.com. Thanks.

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To Do List

My recommendations for new things to read, watch, look at, listen to and do this week:

• According to the NYT A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet. Organizations that track the material are reporting a surge in A.I. images and videos, which are threatening to overwhelm law enforcement (something I warned about in my short story Virtually Innocent nine years ago!).

• Sticking with the Big Apple this comic short film (3’20”) from the New Yorker stars ‘Bighead’ from Silicon Valley as the disgruntled customer of a company that goes to extreme lengths to keep him satisfied. A clever gag or an extremely succinct satire on consumer culture and AI overreach? You decide. Watch ‘Paper Towels’.

That’ll do ya. Cheers, Nx