> Obviously, no one can speak for all writers, but let me make the argument that starting with a blurry copy of unoriginal work isn’t a good way to create original work. If you’re a writer, you will write a lot of unoriginal work before you write something original. And the time and effort expended on that unoriginal work isn’t wasted; on the contrary, I would suggest that it is precisely what enables you to eventually create something original. The hours spent choosing the right word and rearranging sentences to better follow one another are what teach you how meaning is conveyed by prose. Having students write essays isn’t merely a way to test their grasp of the material; it gives them experience in articulating their thoughts. If students never have to write essays that we have all read before, they will never gain the skills needed to write something that we have never read.
I'd add the following to this: The font (as in fountain) of all creativity is the physical and emotional experience of the real world. This is true for writing a great world-changing classic novel as it is for the realm of scientific discovery, new engineering applications, visual or audible art.
It's the stimulus from the natural world, conveyed to us via our senses coupled to our linguistic or symbolic generation capability, that ultimately drives the most novel and relatable rearrangements and transformations of existing information that we eventually call "art". And when a work lacks that foundational experience, or it becomes regurgitated too many times without novel inputs, it begins to feel inauthentic.
For example, when I remodeled my house, I made the plan based on my family's lived experiences, both physical and emotional. Every wall that I bumped up against, every chilly corner, and the ache of my knees carrying laundry up and down stairs informed the remodel. Also, the way I liked to sit when talking to visiting friends.
Sure, some of these things followed well trodden patterns from architecture, remodels and associated trends, but others were quite idiosyncratic, even whimsical, based on the way I like to live. And it's the idiosyncratic and whimsical that creates both novelty and joy in the aesthetic appreciation of things.
Could an AI tool based trained on remodels accelerate aspects of the design? Absolutely (there's a product idea right there). But it would still require extensive input of my experiences in order to create something new from its compressed models of feasible designs, and those experiences are something it can't hallucinate.