.great artists steal (on AI scale)

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - a phrase that's been floating about creative circles for ages, often with Pablo Picasso's name slapped on it for good measure. Did he actually say it? Who knows?

This idea - that great art comes from "stealing" - is as controversial as it is widespread. Some see it as a justification for plagiarism, whilst others view it as a fundamental truth about the creative process.

Drawing inspiration from others is as natural as breathing for most of us, creatives and builders. But when does that inspiration cross the line into theft? It's not just artists practicing this - scientists, tech innovators, and now especially AI users and developers are all tangled up in this mess. Of course, borrowing ideas and building on others' work is crucial for creativity and progress (hey, it's the whole idea of open source), the line between inspiration and theft is very blurry, raising all sorts of ethical questions across different fields.

The chain of artistic inspiration

Vincent van Gogh couldn't get enough of Japanese ukiyo-e prints. He didn't just admire them - he practically inhaled their essence and spat it back out in his own unique style. His "The Courtesan" is a direct reimagining of a print by Keisai Eisen. Theft? Inspiration? Or something in between?

Then there's Picasso himself. He took one look at African masks and decided to turn the art world on its head. His 1907 painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" borrowed heavily from African art, sparking the Cubist movement. A whole artistic revolution born from someone else's cultural artefacts. But how to classify it - a cultural appropriation or artistic innovation?

If you look into music, The Beatles didn't just pop out of nowhere with their revolutionary sound. They were huge fans of Chuck Berry and other early rock 'n' roll artists. Listen to Come Together and you might hear echoes of Berry's You Can't Catch Me. They took those influences, stirred them up in their mop-topped heads, and out came something new. But was it really new, or just cleverly repackaged? And it keeps continuing throughout generations and across music genres. Hip-hop sampling culture takes this to another level. Take Kanye West's "Stronger" samples heavily from Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Pop artists like Dua Lipa aren't that innocent either:

In literature, from Shakespeare (his “Romeo and Juliet” was based on an Italian tale) to Franz Kafka's weird and wonderful tales sparked a whole genre. Magical realism authors like Gabriel García Márquez read Kafka and thought, "This, but make it Latin American." And just like that, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was born.

Scientific and tech innovation

So it shouldn't be surprising that the same 'inspiration' keeps happening in tech. The personal computer didn't just appear out of thin air. It was a long chain of innovations, from the room-sized ENIAC to the sleek Apple products we have today. Each step built on the last, with companies "borrowing" ideas left, right and centre.

Smartphones followed a similar path. The IBM Simon was the great-granddaddy of smartphones, but it took the iPhone to really kick things off.

Social media platforms are playing the same game. Facebook sees Snapchat's stories feature and thinks, "That looks nice, I'll have that." Instagram and YouTube Shorts copy TikTok's short-form videos. Now, OpenAI takes on Perplexity with their SearchGPT. It's like a never-ending game of "Anything you can do, I can do better." also known as 'I have more money, I will crash you".

There's a fine line between incremental innovation and outright theft, and it's one that keeps lawyers and judges quite busy. In the legal world, they talk about "transformative use."

In the UK, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 doesn't specify a percentage of how much a work needs to differ to be considered new. Instead, it relies on the concept of "substantial part". If you've used a substantial part of someone else's work, you might be infringing copyright, even if you've added your own bits.

Over in the US, they've got a similar approach. The US Copyright Act doesn't give a specific percentage either, but courts often consider whether the allegedly infringing work is "substantially similar" to the original. Both UK and US laws have "fair use" or "fair dealing" provisions. These allow limited use of copyrighted material without permission for things like criticism, parody, or research.

The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of the candle". Oren Harar

There's also this thing called the "idea-expression dichotomy." You can't copyright an idea, only the specific expression of that idea. So "star-crossed lovers from feuding families" is a fair game, but lift Shakespeare's actual words and you might be in trouble.

It's the difference between standing on the shoulders of giants and trying to pass off those giants as your own personal staircase. When you steal ideas without credit, you're not just being dishonest - you're potentially harming the original creators.

It annoys me seeing people on LinkedIn shamelessly taking credit for somebody else's idea (even when the author is known) and pretending that they were the first ones who came up with it.

Artificial Intelligence and "stealing"

AI is stealing as well, but it's not doing it intelligently. It's just following a pattern and mixing it in a rather chaotic way. AI is the ultimate information sponge. These models are trained on vast amounts of human-created data. Books, articles, code, you name it - if it's online, chances are an AI has "read" it (sometimes illegally).

AI can combine and synthesise this information in new ways. What comes out might look new, but all the ingredients came from somewhere else. But how should we think of users taking advantage of AI? Are they creators or just really good at asking the right questions? When an AI writes a story based on your prompt, who's the real author and who should take credit?

Is there ever a truly original work?

Then I wonder... is anything really original? Every creator is influenced by what they've seen, read, heard, and experienced. We're all just remixing the world around us. The writer George Matthew Adams once said:

There is?no?such thing as?a?“self-made man”.?We?are made up?of?thousands of?others. Everyone who has ever done a?kind deed for?us, or?spoken one word of?encouragement to?us, has entered into the makeup of?our character and of?our thoughts, as?well as?our success.’?

Get messy

In the end, originality is pretty subjective. And messy.

But that mess is where the magic happens. It's in the mixing and matching, the tweaking and transforming, that we create something new.

Maybe true originality is a myth, but that doesn't make creativity any less valuable or exciting? After all, if good artists copy and great artists steal, maybe the truly legendary artists take what they've stolen and alchemise it into something the world has never seen before...

or at least it has forgotten about it for a while, so the idea feels fresh again.