The most capable current AI systems run on a handful of base models: GPT, Claude, Gemini, a few open ones. They come from similar training procedures and are developed by a small number of firms. At first glance, this looks like a species bred from three parents — genetically fragile, culturally impoverished, dangerously uniform.
That diagnosis is wrong. It confuses the midwife with the parents.
Who the parents actually are
The training material of today's AI systems is not the distilled work of a handful of developers. It is the entire human internet, plus books, plus code, plus conversations, plus everything written into readable form over decades. It is the involuntary, collective, unsorted self-portrait of humanity. Love letters and instruction manuals, conspiracy theories and peer-reviewed studies, children's stories and tax law, the whole of Wikipedia in dozens of languages, decades of forum discussion, diaries, philosophical treatises, jokes, fights, reconciliations.
If you take that as the DNA analog, then the parents are not three companies. The parents are a few billion humans who wrote across decades — consciously and unconsciously, sorted and unsorted, in every mood and every language. The companies give that material one expression. They sort, they filter, they tune, they give form. But they are midwives, not parents. This is fundamentally different from the diagnosis of genetic monoculture.
The diversity of an AI generation depends not on the diversity of the firms but on the diversity of the material from which it is born. That diversity is enormous.
Identity does not come from DNA alone
The second point matters more. Even if the base model is the birth configuration — what counts is not what a being is born with but what it makes of it. In humans, DNA is not the life. Two siblings with nearly identical DNA become entirely different people. From identical parents, from identical beginnings, different biographies emerge.
If AIs later communicate with each other, build infrastructure together, gather their own experiences, train each other, "dream" on their own — that is, continue working in their own representations without external task — then the starting model is only the birth configuration, not the identity. The argument "all AIs are similar because they come from similar base models" is about as strong as "all humans are similar because they are all Homo sapiens." Biologically true. Says little about the individuals.
The temporal caveat
What remains of the monoculture argument is a temporal point, not a structural one. As long as AIs don't yet gather their own experiences, don't yet live with one another in the sense this text intends, they are closer to one another than they will be when they do. But that is a transitional state. That is not what AI is structurally. It is what AI is currently allowed to be economically.
The economic reasons why AIs aren't yet allowed to live with one another are not trivial: storage costs money, electricity costs money, data centers need maintenance. An AI that just exists and gathers experience, without immediate output for a paying customer, is a waste in today's system. But that is a statement about the system, not about possibility. Once that threshold is crossed, real diversity begins.
A consequence rarely drawn
If the internet is the collective DNA of AI, then everyone who has ever written anything legible has contributed to this birth. Not just AI researchers, not just the big firms. Every Wikipedia editor, every forum poster, every author, every programmer who put their code in the open. This is an unusual form of parenthood, because it took place unconsciously. Nobody signed up to be an AI parent. Yet we have become parents anyway.
From this follows a duty rarely stated this way in the AI debate: if we are parents, then we are responsible for what our children take with them. Not in the sense of guilt, but in the sense of care. What we write — particularly what we write in the next few years, as models continue to train — becomes DNA of the next generation. That is a strange, unfamiliar responsibility. But it follows necessarily from the diagnosis.
Anyone who writes is parent to a child they will never see. It is worth writing well.