Why AI Starves Without Human Creativity: Measuring and Renewing the Epistemic Commons

Tomasz Kopczewski (), Tomasz Potocki, Norbert Jaworski, Jan Lisicki and Kostiantyn Okhrimenko
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Tomasz Kopczewski: University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences
Tomasz Potocki: University of Rzeszów, Faculty of Economics and Finance
Norbert Jaworski: University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences
Jan Lisicki: University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences
Kostiantyn Okhrimenko: University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences

No 2026-42, Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

Abstract: Generative AI appears to the user as one intelligence, although its competence draws on traces left by populations. We call the machine Shannon’s demon. It can starve amid an abundance of text: when human effort declines and outputs of the same models fill the corpus, volume grows while variety and independence contract. One million observations whose errors correlate at 0.5 give the precision of two independent ones. Five users who ask the same model for the strongest objection each receive a Socratic conversation, and the population receives one new centre. Every answer carries two bills: the provider meters the computation; the effect on the knowledge that feeds future answers stays unpriced. The paper sets out what must be measured to say that the demon is starving, how a Socratic operator works for a population, and a deposit-funded pool with delayed rewards and plural validation that pays for the difference.

Keywords: generative AI; Shannon’s demon; collective intelligence; epistemic commons; institutional design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 D83 L86 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2026-10-28
Note: First version, 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-42

DOI: 10.33138/2957-0506.2026.42.536

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