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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

It's very good but it's also recycled Ayn Rand, the Fountainhead.

There is a similar theme in both of an artistic person not wanting to compromise their vision to suit common tastes. But this goes in a completely different direction than Rand.

Well of course in 700 pages you'll be about way more than any super short story as this one. But it's there for me quite vividly. Of course LLMs give an amalgamation of many things, but it's like when you look at AI generated pictures and can see the base of the inspiration quite vividly. And then all of this is subjective anyway. People review that book and come away with wildly different interpretations already.

I don't mean that Rand wrote more. I mean that her idea was different and nearly opposite. This is a short story about an artist learning to reframe their frustration with customers wanting utility over artistry as a positive. The similarity to Rand is in the first few sentences. The point is entirely different.

If you judge stories to be the same based on this level of similarity, then The Fountainhead is just the same as a dozen older stories with the artist vs the philistine theme. It was common before Rand. As T. S. Eliot said, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal".

I've not read it. Could you either link to a section or generally describe the reference?

I have, and it’s not.

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