About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.
The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.
At the time, I worried this was going to become a much bigger problem. That the fear of AI “cheating” would create a culture that actively punished good writing and pushed students toward mediocrity. I was hoping I’d be wrong about that.
Turns out … I was not wrong.
I’m accused of being AI on other sites simply because I construct complex sentences with regularity – and use emdashes.
This is because all art are forms of remixing, whether it’s intentional or not. We’re teaching the wrong lessons here.
For many many centuries, art and artists, whether it’s musicians, artists, actors, writers, essayists, whoever, they have been facing an uphill battle of oversaturation in each creative industry. It’s only gotten worse in the past 50-75 years, and we’re more exposed to the sheer numbers now. We are throwing a drop of water into an ocean and hoping people will notice.
Trying to use “plagiarism detectors” against databases of millions or billions of pages is about as pointless as accusing songwriters of plagiarizing songs based on four notes. There are only so many musically-useful combinations of four notes, and they have all been used. Adam Neely has been reporting on this garbage for years.
LLMs are just making the problem even more obvious: creativity is not unique, it is not unique to people, and people have been mentally trained to expect uniqueness so much that we purposely ignore 99.999% of the material that is offered to us. As such, only 0.0001% of the ones who create earn any sort of popularity, and the rest starve to death. We ourselves are starved for content, as we consume anything that fits our extremely narrow definition of creativity like the voracious vampires we are.
I feel like the idea that art is “remixing” is a bit of an imprecise explanation that often leads people to think that when artists create similar works they’re basing the one on the other.
Take music as an example. Let’s say you’ve got a standard 6-string guitar fretted for 12 tone even temperament. If you take one string and explore all the relationships between the notes, you’re going to independently discover things about intervals, scales, and modes without necessarily learning any of the terminology, theory, or history associated with any particular cultural context. Your ear will show you that a major scale sounds one way and a minor scale sounds another without going into it knowing which is which. You’ll notice that when you play 0, 2, 4, 5 it sounds uplifting, and when you play 0, 2, 3, 5 it can sound a little more sorrowful.
When you discover a double harmonic scale, it’s going to naturally have elements that sound similar to the Mayamalavagowla raga and the Bhairav raga even if you have never heard a single note of Indian music. You didn’t have to conjure up these elements to try to sound like music based on these ragas, because the elements are preexisting. You could play these scales on the other side of the galaxy with no knowledge of Earth and the mathematical relationships at play between the frequencies would remain.
The same is true of melodies within a scale. The intervals of notes push and pull in different directions and give a feeling of wanting to land somewhere while taking a route that feels right. If you play around with an E minor scale long enough, you’re probably going to eventually play the first five notes in a way that sounds a lot like the chorus from “I Was Made For Lovin’ You” just by playing around with runs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard the song or aren’t aware of KISS, it’s right there on the fretboard. Assuming that those notes coming out of your strings is specifically tied to one song or one band ignores the fact that whoever wrote that song also had to discover that arrangement of preexisting intervals on a preexisting scale. In this particular case it’s just a run back and forth from 1-5, pretty simple. That also extends to other relationships between intervals, because the notes come with weight and an accompanying feeling that pushes them toward some sort of outcome.
I think for people who don’t play an instrument, this isn’t always intuitive. Part of the same hump that can make it difficult for someone to get into music in the first place can contribute to this outlook too. If they think they have to plan every note and aren’t aware of the process of playing by feeling, it seems calculated rather than organic. You certainly can calculate every step, but playing music doesn’t require it and neither do many other forms of art.
Obviously we also learn from the art around us, so it’s not as though we’re learning in a total vacuum. Part of why a note feels like it makes sense to go in a direction is because of learned context. Take Nirvana, for example. If you grew up on Nirvana, it may feel more obvious to include what might otherwise have been counterintuitive intervals that someone who’s never listened to anything but 18th century Western European music might find jarring. Or more generally, if you are used to a musical tradition that’s informed by blues somewhere in its history, you’re probably more likely to have a positive visceral reaction to the use of blue notes in the right context.
But that still doesn’t necessarily mean just xeroxing pieces of genres and slapping them together. It informs what you feel about your organic exploration of music. There may be elements that are explicitly and intentionally borrowed, but I don’t think that’s the primary reason we see these similarities.
Similarities exist because creating art is an organic process informed by physical law, our bodies, and the tools we use, and because the process is taking place on the same planet and often in the same or similar contexts as other pieces of art.