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Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?

In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence?

If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all.

But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.

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The whole idea of "there is no such thing as an original idea" is utterly stupid. It's just a hyperbole and some people are taking it literally.

Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities:

1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B.

2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea.

For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why? Since the four basic nucleobase existed, there haven't been any new DNA creatures?

The real reason that it feels like there isn't new idea is simple: the "mixing" process happens gradually. Even if you come up with a really good "X + Z" idea, people (read: market) might not accept it because what they're familiar with is "X + Y".

So you put a bit of Z to make "X + 0.9Y + 0.1Z", and another person who is as smart as you makes "X + 0.8Y + 0.2Z"... then when "X + Z" is officially a thing, people outside think you smart-ass guys were all just copying & pasting each other.

In the context of this thread however, an AI mixing a randomly selected A and B makes it generate an idea that is just as original as a human's.

I do believe AI sometimes generates an idea that is just as original as a human's.

I don't believe originality is that valuable. It's a positive term to me, but just slightly.

I've seen a lot people on HN credit the SV companies' "free food" practice to google. Do they believe free food for your employees is a new idea that someone in google came up with? I don't think so.

> 2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea.

With such definition, GPT-4 can create new ideas.

It definitely can. GPT-3 can too. You know the joke about "idea guy"? Who has "idea" but no programming/design skill and no connection to bring funding? New ideas aren't always very valuable.

At least GPT brings funding sometimes.

I'm finding it spectacular for generating ideas. Ask it for "40 ideas for plugins I could build for Datasette" for example. The results are comparable to what I've seen from a meeting room full of humans for an hour, but GPT-4 generated them in less than a minute.

Really? I feel like if you have to ask what plugins to build you’re doing it wrong. You should know what plugins to build by being a user of Datasette and understanding its limitations for your self.

I know Datasette better than anyone else, and I still couldn't come up with 40 useful ideas in less than a minute.

Once you have an AI to also prototype the plugin ideas, such an idea list may become useful. I've always seen that the owners of any product have more product improvement ideas than they could economically implement.

I asked GPT-4 to implement a simple plugin yesterday, and the code was 90% right out of the box.

> For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why?

In copyright-law (and I think patents?), there is the Threshold of originality. Basically you evaluate how much work and change went into something, to distinguish it from other works. Which IMHO comes down to how much of a and b can you still see in the mix, and how much did mixing them changed them in the end product. If the change is low, then people more likely consider it as not innovative.

Or how Homer Simpson once said: “People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it or something.”

Copyrights don't protect novelty. Two people can independently create the same thing and both be entitled to copyright. You cannot do that in patent. Only one is an invention in the eyes of the law.

The threshold for originality in copyright is the bare minimum, so it's not a good standard for "invention". Patents have a much higher bar to overcome, and it is hard to put into a simple explanatory phrase.

I think what you are describing in copyright isn't the issue of originality, but determining what is encompassed in a copyrighted work. The court will analyze what the work consists of, and what of it was your expression, as opposed to someone else's. So, it's not novelty exactly but it's close.

> Copyrights don't protect novelty.

Yes, and no. I can't speak for laws in the USA, as I'm from Europe. But Copyright-laws in the EU do have parts which specifically target mixing and mashups of content, and how much new content of your you need to add to make it count as a separate work. These parts were recently updated, because of YouTube, the meme-culture and so on. But it's my understanding that for music and text-quotes, the whole concept is already longer around. So I guess US-Laws do have something like this too?

So of course, this does not handle novelty on a global scale for all of mankind's knowledge and content, but the general Idea and how to handle it is there.

> Two people can independently create the same thing and both be entitled to copyright.

Similar maybe. But for literally the same, I doubt it. People are getting already sued for having too much similarity.

My point is more that, in the way the law works out, what you get to protect is the part of an expression that is unique to you, which can include mashups, etc. My point being that this is perhaps distinct from novelty, as novelty isn't a requirement of copyright, just independent creation.

>Similar maybe. But for literally the same, I doubt it. People are getting already sued for having too much similarity.

Full stop yes. Independent creation of the same thing is not an issue in copyright law in the US. I do not speak about Euro copyright, as I'm merely a US atty. In US copyright law, a necessary element of infringement is access to the allegedly copied work - if access to the work is rebutted, then there is no copying and no infringement. The copyright stands.

Copyright laws are a tool, not a reason by itself. They are aimed to give money to inventors, not to judge innovation. You can argue they do judge in order to accomplish their aim, but that's the byproduct, not the aim. So let's not give the laws more meaning and usage than they deserve.

on similar (I think) line of thought, but further along,

the reason to have property (also a tool, or social-technology to be slightly more precise), i.e. ownership over things is a byproduct of having a marketplace in which we can trade.

In this view, the marketplace (or trade, depending on your outlook) is THE WAY to come together and put all our skills together in order to co-create (con-struct) something much larger.

Alas, capitalism means that only a very few chosen elites (which are, by this point, mostly autonomous corporations) get to decide what we all work together to co-create. We as human individuals are only able to participate in this figurative "marketplace" (understood as a social-technology) as the part of merchandise, specifically as 'commodity'-style labor.

Do you have an alternative to suggest? Under most of human history the chosen elites inherited their positions from an ancestor who won an important war. Capitalism may not be an even playing field but the process that lets Elon Musk build landing Rockets is an order of magnitude more even than the process that let Kuresh build pyramids. Is there a model that might be more even still?

nevermind

Totally agree. The idea that ideas/bits can be owned is a slippery slope with bad policy at the bottom. Maybe it was once necessary as a sort of training wheels for innovation, but it has long since become more of a drag than it's worth.

Ah, that's fair. I formulate a similar observation by saying that digital assets inhabit a post-scarcity economy which doesn't work the same as a resource-based scarcity one, and using the same money for both requires more suspension of disbelief than most of us are capable of.

>> Basically you evaluate how much work and change went into something, to distinguish it from other works.

Copyright exemptions (fair use/fair dealing etc) are a million times more complex than that. There are times when one adds almost nothing yet will still get protection. Take political humor. A standard bit is just to point out something funny. Look at how often political comics (John oliver/stewart etc) just play a clip of some politician. No edits. No commentary. The clip speaks for itself. That is still protected speech. Understanding how the comic adds to the clip cannot be expressed in numbers.

You are confusing the "copying" analysis element of infringement, with the affirmative defense of fair use. They are not related. A necessary element of proving infringement is showing what was copied, which most likely requires the court to construe exactly what is covered under a given copyright.

I mean, if the examples are to be believed, GPT4 seems to be able to explain what's funny about a given image. It's not out of the question that it or some future iteration could reduce that very thing to a discrete set of numeric scores.

There's two variations, one stupid one not. The stupid one is "novelty no longer exists and maybe never did". You've covered it. The not stupid one is this question about the closure under creativity in the same sense that numbers are closed under multiplication and addition. Sure you can make infinite numbers, but you can never multiply and add your way to a cat, because a cat isn't a number. Is everything we do rearrangement of basic known parts much like numerics is rearrangement of basic known digits? Its a deep question.

Your "deep question" fails to address gspencley's point: If everything we do is a rearrangement of basic known parts, where and when did we get the basic known parts? From cavemen? From apes? From protozoa? Someone, at some time came up with the basic known parts.

So, was that real creativity, or not? If not, why not? If the parts are really "basic", they didn't come from other, pre-existing parts.

And if it was real creativity, why is it impossible for us to do the same?

If you need examples of creativity, look at the math. Math is full of the novel (at the time of invention) concepts: complex numbers, groups, automorphisms, etc., etc. None of these concepts can be obtained by rearranging the "parts". Sometimes a new concept requires the invention of "parts" that had never existed before, and, in turn, becomes a "part" in the future inventions.

All the advances relying on new concepts and discoveries or inventions in science, math, logic and technology would suggest that the basic known parts are not set. So yes, there's been plenty of genuine novelty. Culture as well as new forms of music, food and entertainment come into existence. New words are always being coined as languages are fluid.

I think that most people are attached to the idea that humans have some type of "soul", even if they don't call it that. This soul, as the thinking goes, is completely separate from material reality, and allows people to have ideas that come "out of nowhere" and are not inspired by anything in particular. In this way, humans are supposedly different from machines, whose outputs are a mere function of their inputs.

This is the root of the objection to AI. To say that humans are similar would imply that a person's thoughts are a function of their sensory experiences, and that is not a popular view.

Similarly, people like to think that a person's behavior is not a mere function of their experience- that they are capable of "choosing" how to react to their circumstances. They will accept no explanation that appeals to material conditions or biology. A man steals bread not because he is poor and hungry, nor because of some chemical reaction in his brain, but because he "chose" to steal. The part that chooses would his "soul", which cannot be explained in terms of cause-and-effect.

No, this a straw man. The line of reasoning here, first, makes a lot of presuppositions about AI and it is overly reductionist about human intelligence. I see this comment constantly in all HN threads about AI, “humans intelligence is nothing but probabilistic sparks” or whatever just actually means.

You’re going to have a lot of unproductive conversations if this what you believe other people think.

There’s a much richer discussion going on about current-generation AI and its prospects that is grounded in plainly materialist and technical insights, with thoughtful differences of opinion about what current research demonstrates and about what the sophistication of biological/neurological machines may involve in comparison.

You might find that conversation more enriching if you tune into it instead of the one you seem to be focused on.

I’ve always interpreted statements like “there’s no such thing as an original idea” or “everything’s a remix” not literally, but rather as a reminder that new ideas are born from a cultural context and the ideas in it, using those ideas like a language of creative expression.

I often take it a step further and use it as a reminder that new ideas are rarely born from one person but rather the contributions of many, each too small to be noticed as an “original idea”, but when viewed collectively, can be revolutionary.

Isn't the "no such thing as an original idea" point more about there being so many people alive now that one cannot think of anything that somebody else hasn't though of as well?

So many advancements (like the airplane) often get invented simultaneously by different people in completely different areas of the globe without any connection to each other.

"C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..."

"A fax machine is just a telephone and a waffle iron!" —Abraham Simpson

If we follow this line of thinking: in the, let's call it, "pre-AI" days all of the ideas that we have of the form "Mixing A and B" are ones that at least one human found to be interesting/valuable (and the ones that become common and get remixed must have been interesting/valuable to many humans). Maybe the "originality" of the idea isn't the thing we care about, per se, but rather that fact that somebody though it was interesting to shine a spotlight on this region of the idea space for the first time.

But now that we have software that can generate massive amounts of "Mixing A and B" ideas automatically... I dunno, seems like we're heading toward a sort of "pollution of the idea atmosphere" where we get a ton of new/remixed ideas dumped into the world that haven't passed through that initial filter of a human vetting them as particularly useful or valuable or interesting in the first place.

> I dunno, seems like we're heading toward a sort of "pollution of the idea atmosphere" where we get a ton of new/remixed ideas dumped into the world that haven't passed through that initial filter of a human vetting them

We already have that. Observe: ahem “It is an industrial capacity, that many people like the Reddit poem person who does the cow thing. And everyone delighted in the nonsense of words that are sense.” Or, perhaps you want something on-topic? “Your ideas about ideas are mere ideas. Ideas that are ideas are ideas, but these ideas are not ideas. lol!” Perhaps an unoriginal, unfiltered synthesis of some good ideas? “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a potato peeler could save you 5 Altairian dollars a day.”

We don't need AI to produce unoriginal, unfiltered internet comments. Certain YouTube comments sections provide a great example (though the problem with YouTube comments isn't as bad as people tend to make out). We humans already have social mechanisms to keep the good ideas and ditch the bad ideas, even when many of the humans aren't bothering to filter their own output.

> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?

And the obvious answer of course is that recycling / mixing can be innovative and creative. The dichotomy only exists in our heads.

I believe this is because of how our culture choose to reward intelectual output. Your output needs to appear sufficiently original to be worthy of reward and protection.

For example a musician who creates a new song is not rewarded, in fact punished for naming all the influences they had coming in to said new song. (both morally, by people who would think less of them, and by lawsuits asking for a share of their profit.)

I feel like this heavily requires “citation needed”. There are plenty of these “inside the studio” type interviews where an artist describes at length their inspirations and the other artists they admired and wanted to mimic in some way.

I think this is mostly referring to the Blurred Lines verdict. On the other hand, artists have a strong incentive to record their songwriting and recording process, so that they can head off any potential disputes about writing credits from people actually in the studio (this situation is statistically much more likely than somebody not involved suing after the song's release).

> I think this is mostly referring to the Blurred Lines verdict.

Interesting. I was mostly referring to the "Shake It Off" and the "Thinking Out Loud" copyright cases.

The "Shake It Off" case seems like it involves lyrical content, which had always been a primary concern of music copyright, even before "Blurred Lines". The "Thinking Out Loud" case seems to involve similar issues to the "Blurred Lines" case, but was filed long after[1]:

> While the Gaye family is not involved in the “Thinking Out Loud” lawsuits against Sheeran, the precedent set in their case looms over all new copyright infringement claims. Notably, the court took into account not just sheet music but studio arrangement too and ruled that “Blurred Lines” significantly aped the vibe of “Got to Give It Up,” something that had previously been beyond copyright protection.

[1]: https://rollingstoneindia.com/copyright-infringement-lawsuit....

> I feel like this heavily requires “citation needed”.

You might have missed that I was stating my belief. I can only cite myself as the ultimate authority on what beliefs I have or don't have.

If instead of believing something I will know something you will notice from the lack of "I believe" and the appropriate citations. If we would need to provide citations for any belief we could not talk about theories and ideas we have which as of yet lack the sufficient evidentiary backing.

Now of course it sounds like what you are trying to express is that you are disagreeing with my belief. Which is perfectly fine.

> There are plenty of these “inside the studio” type interviews where an artist describes at length their inspirations and the other artists they admired and wanted to mimic in some way.

Yes. Humans are full of contradictions therefore you won't see black-and-white behaviour from them.

I have had exactly this argument before and this has always been my issue with the claim. I recall people saying this about music when I was in college, an example I find especially frustrating because, per my friends argument, all contemporary music is influenced by, say, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, 'the greats' etc, and nothing new can truly be created in the shadow of these classics. It's nuts because it ignores all of human civilization up to that point, and doesn't give credit to people in the present day for being able to be original.

But I think the way you have put it here is more clear than anything I've been able to manage. I think I put it in a more extreme form, which is to say that the earth had no life on it for ~3 billion years, and still no humans until ~100k years ago. At some point the first music was made. And if it could be original then, whatever it was that made that possible, should presumably make it possible now, too.

That "1%" original is almost always just 1% uncited/unknown inspiration.

If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's almost always some domain expert visited some domain in which they were not an expert and inspiration struck on how to combine the domains.

Otherwise, the rest of invention is either human imitations or improvements to things found in nature or not inventions at all but discoveries stumbled upon by accident/experimentation.

Nothing is just willed into existence by pure "thought". Every thought you've had is a product of the things you've been surrounded by.

So Ramanujan with no formal training in mathematics was really surrounded by advanced education of mathematics and had no original ideas? I feel if more people studied philosophy they may discover how problematic these reductions are.

Math isn't a human invention at all. It's the discovery of the nature of the universe and an expression of the world around us.

What does that even mean? Mathematical ideas are ideas. The notion of continued fractions is not just an expression of the world around us. This is basically hokum. The point is that human intelligence utilized original thoughts in the case of Ramanujan.

One of your three sheep is black. 1/3 - that's a fraction, a idealized representation of the real world. Now you take that concept and do it again over and over ad infinitum.

That's not a magical invention that has no bearing on the world around us. That's just an expression of real world taken to its logical conclusion. It was not invented from a vacuum, it was invented from the input of the world around us.

What is "hokum" is the idea that the human mind would somehow come up with meaningful output without meaningful input to seed it.

I think the simpler answer is that GP's assertion is just incorrect, and that humans regularly create genuinely original content.

I'd say it's possible that there have truly not been any original ideas, and the earliest human ideas might've been just remixing observed natural phenomena. What would muddy the waters there is that humans are complex organisms that in turn exhibit naturally complex behaviors both on an individual and a societal level. And there's even emotions that we feel due to our biology. But if you define all these as phenomena we observed about ourselves, I think my initial assertion still makes sense.

No true original ideas and there was just remixing natural phenomena? Really? So writing was just remixing all the writing that people saw volcanoes and rainstorms do?

I would advise reading allllllll the way till the second sentence in my comment.

Writing was a remix of pictorial representation, which was a remix of the way things like ox heads, flowing water, and birds look.

>> No true original ideas and there was just remixing natural phenomena? Really? So writing was just remixing all the writing that people saw volcanoes and rainstorms do?

> Writing was a remix of pictorial representation, which was a remix of the way things like ox heads, flowing water, and birds look.

That's the kind of absurd reasoning when you take some proposition and try to defend it to the death even though its wrong.

I'm not the one preserving the word 'remix' in this context, I just wanted to put it in the terms that GP was using. It certainly sounds more absurd when you use that word.

But the point is that human creations are always based on something else, so pointing out that AI is basing its output on a database of previous work does not necessarily mean that it is not creating new art, or being creative, or however else you want to put it.

It's like the ridiculous lawsuits that claim a song is stolen because it uses the same chord progression as an older song, where there are almost always centuries-old examples of that same progression from Beethoven et al.

Your point seems to be that the reasoning is absurd because it's defending an incorrect premise, and the premise is obviously wrong because the reasoning is absurd, so I'm not you'll want to know what the people on the other side of this discussion think.

The earliest humans didn't know everything we know today. How could they had any ideas about digital simulations, branching timelines or nuclear war?

There's a million things today that didn't exist back then, and many things that came to exist culturally over time, or were discovered. Do you think they were sitting around the fire talking about how the molecular motion registers as a conscious heat sensation in animals or what the proper interpretation of QM is?

I don't have a definite conclusion on anything, but I remember having this discussion with a friend a long time ago, and it made me think... What he was trying to convince me was that all of those things you mention can be seen as subclasses of other natural things:

Digital simulations are self-explanatory - All things simulated must have an existing thing they are simulating. Digital is one type of representation of an already existing thing. It can be seen as a subclass of concept/drawing/painting/.

Branching timelines are more abstract, but it's ultimately based on the idea of a tree. Dilemmas over branching decisions have existed as long as we have been able to think. We branch timelines in our imaginations while playing chess or doing any strategic endeavor where decisions and responses to those decisions matter. FFT: Decision tree, binary tree, random forests, etc. These don't quite cover the complexity of QM, but it's hard to ignore that there is overlap.

A nuke is a type of bomb, which is a type of rapid expansion, which is just an expansion of something (volcano, lightning, comets, etc...)

My friend's point was that of course a caveman won't be thinking about quantum mechanics, but they were thinking about the more basic things that ultimately led to their descendants thinking about QM.

Just food for thought.

Combinatoric complexity blows up fast

Your comment immediately made me think of The Beatles. They are responsible for so many original things. They launched the album era and invented the concept album. They brought in entirely new instruments into rock music. They changed the culture around sexual expressiveness, and they introduced the western world to eastern philosophies.

But when you start to scrutinize everything they did, there are many clear examples of things and people that did those things first and directly influenced them. However, they may have been the first to do it in their specific flavor, which is undoubtedly original.

The most original thing I can think of that The Beatles did was add sound to the runoff track at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so that it keeps playing the sound infinitely until the needle is removed on the turntable. I’m sure someone with more insight can point to another musician doing that first, but at The Beatles’ scale, we collectively come to believe they were the first to do it.

> Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?

Somewhere around 2016, when the golden Age of Internet-Content ended, as the last undiscovered part was added to the mix...

But jokes aside, does innovation really need to be new? Or would it still innovative if you don't know it when you create something you for you? Take for example all the retro-waves which regularly come back, where people discover something for them completely new, and make up some for them completely new things, which the generations for them already did long ago.

> In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea"

Does Original mean 100% new? And would it demand that all parts are new, or would it still original if we just arrange old parts in a new way?

I think this is purely a statistics problem. Like all breakthroughs are actually _discoveries_ of things that already do exist or mechanisms that can be exploited somehow.

There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances.

Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it.

> peak human innovation

that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us.

with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives.

the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.

There's nothin' you can do that can't be done

Nothin' you can sing that can't be sung

Nothin' you can say, but you can learn how to play the game

It's easy

Nothin' you can make that can't be made

No one you can save that can't be saved

Nothin' you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time

It's easy

All you need is love

Great song, but isn't it just a derivative of songs that came before it? Nothing creative here.

That seems like a straightforward one; if humans are incapable of original thought then the original part probably came from sources that are not human and 'innovation' in the sense of 'an AI couldn't do this' never existed. We just need to make the AI better at interfacing with the real source of novelty - reality - than the current method of trying to interpret existing pictures on the internet.

There will be a big leap forward when we get to teaching these things from video streams so they can get the concept of 3D properly.

"Why did innovation and creativity stop" because ideas are remixed is like saying when do the flowers stop blooming because the sun exists. The sun is an integral piece of why flowers grow.

Read How to Ride a Bicycle. Human creativity is just a lot of work, often connecting novel ideas together while doing so.

Recycling / remixing content from the past *is* innovation and creativity.

> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?

Your question contains the answer. Remixing begets innovation / creativity begets remixing.

It's just something people say lazily in passing without giving much actual thought to why they're repeating what they saw somewhere else in a similar thread.

Creativity and innovation didn't ever stop.

Its only words and concepts and we keep inventing new ones constantly. We also imbue new meaning to words and concepts over time.

Maybe they didn't stop, but they're converging towards zero. In the past hundred years, artists were coming up with a lot of things that had not existed for all of humanity. Nowadays, it's rare to find truly original style. The space has been explored thoroughly. It's also not just random search. It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them. If you leave it off, you just get crap.

>Maybe they didn't stop, but they're converging towards zero. In the past hundred years, artists were coming up with a lot of things that had not existed for all of humanity.

How do you distinguish this from survivorship bias? There were probably tons of shitty artists 100 years ago but you haven't heard of them.

> It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them.

I've been thinking about this. I don't think it's evidence that anything is getting worse, because a lot of the prompts people use are referring to recent artists/styles. Is it possible that leaving out the style/artist leads to an average of every style which doesn't really work?

>In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence?

By observing nature, and then iterating on that over thousands of years of culture. Of course the question is whether and to what degree the process of iteration and transformation matters.

How would you define an "original idea?" An idea with no origin or source, that spontaneously manifests from the aether? That isn't possible, everything must be extrapolated from something prior.

Yes, it's more accurate to say that ideas exist on a spectrum of novelty, with varying degrees of originality.

> when did innovation and creativity stop?

Or did it ever stop ?

it is like they say "there's nothing new under the sun, but maybe behind it?"

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