"But everyone borrows from everything they've ever read or watched or listened to."
Sure. Some even plagiarize. The best ones are discerning in what they borrow, how they do it and how it helps them to create something new. Something that person thought about, felt about, had an opinion of, and steered throughout its gestation and birth.
LLMs/AI do not do this. They cannot think. They cannot feel. They have no discernment.
Make it simple:
Say there's an LLM that has *only* been trained on the works of Douglas Adams. Just his books, his screenplays, his letters. That's all the reference this LLM has.
And you ask it to write a novel about a man who has lost his wife in a terrible accident and later joins a cultish farming community in Arizona where he adopts an orphan who doesn't speak.
That novel could be about a man named Arthur Beeblebrox, a much-hated poet who stole a time machine (with a heart of gold) from a government agency following the death of his wife, Tricia, after she floated off into space with his favorite towel. He winds up in Magrathea, Arizona where he joins the Arkleseizures and meets a sad little boy named Marvin.
While the basic outline follows from the prompt, the tone, character names and circumstances are clearly Adams.
LLMs, however, are not being trained on one artist only, but all of them, every book, every play, every poem, every piece of music, every film, tv show, everything down to your personal emails. When you feed one a prompt, there's no telling where it might pull references from, but if you *could* see it, the absolutely mechanical, unfeeling, unthinking manner in which it fulfills your request? Where is the art in that? It's just randomizing in order *not* to be seen as copying.
[And before someone brings up Tristan Tzara dumping a hatful of letters onto the floor to rearrange into his poetry, Tzara came up with that idea, cut out the worlds and letters himself, put them in the hat himself and chose how those seemingly-random words became an expression.]
LLMs do not express. They're crane grabber stolen valor machines (married to ecological terrorism) and you get what you get if anything at all. There's a reason it's called slop because its sloppy with stolen style and sensibility.
Make your own stuff: you'll feel better and you won't be contributing to our ecological demise.
PS: making your own stuff is also rewarding on multiple levels (emotional, psychological, spiritual, physical and, if you're really fortunate, financial) and when you're asked to explain your process, you don't look like one of those DOGE boys trying to explain what DEI is.
