The difference is that AI is not people "taking your stuff and building upon it", it's just people taking your stuff in direct competition with you.

To torture your metaphor a little, if information/"question answers" is food, then AI companies are farmers depleting their own soil. They can talk about "more food for everyone" all they want, but it's heading to collapse.

(Consider, especially, that many alternatives to AI were purposefully scuttled. People praise AI search ... primarily by lamenting the current state of Google Search. "Salting their carrot fields to force people to buy their potatos"?)

Setting aside any would-be "AGI" dreams, in the here-and-now AI is incapable of generating new information ex-nihilo. AI recipes need human recipes. If we want to avoid an Information Dust Bowl, we need to act now.