My roommate is a prominent board member of USF’s mock trial team. Earlier this week, while we were watching The Sopranos on our disheveled college couch, I was itching for a debate. I randomly posed the question: Is originality dead? Just our typical Friday night.
We debated for an hour. Here are my thoughts:
I would like to consider myself a student of the arts. I want to write and perform and debate and create. I want to do it all. However, I’m frightened that everything I do and desire to do has already been done; my life’s work led to a reproduced concoction of other people’s ideas.
Is the adage “great minds think alike,” in its truest form, far more factual than we believe? The human race is built to inspire and be inspired, that I can argue. However, with the internet feeding us everything we could ever want, our creative hunger diminishes. We are bloated on content and refuse to exercise our right brain. Songs sound the same, every indie-rock band has been trying to recreate “Mr. Brightside” since ‘04, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge went from Killing Eve and Fleabag to Indiana Jones and Star Wars, setting the scene for other brilliant writers and performers in the industry.
Art < Money…
On another note, during Hollywood’s WGA strike, we asked for protection against AI. According to the Associated Press, “The deal states that writers can use AI if the company consents. But a company cannot require a writer to use AI software.” I’m not going to be the next Aaron Sorkin (although one can dream), though, with the protection against AI through AMPTP, my future as an aspiring creator is more secure if there is protection in the big leagues. Whenever I send my mom my writing, her immediate inquiry is, did ChatGPT help you with this? I mean, how am I supposed to be taken seriously as a writer if Sorkin isn’t? It’s hard to reconcile.
Yet, I digress. Isn’t it possible for an original hypothesis to give rise to original evidence, ultimately leading to new conclusions? Beyond everything, we explore the uncharted territories of knowledge, and to do that, we must first conceive the unknown. Originality will forever prosper in the realm of unconventional thinking. And artists are the masters of the unconventional. We are the masters of taking the personal and the raw and the emotional and turning them into art. No one has identical lives, upbringings, or experiences. So, if we continue to draw from our own lives, then originality doesn’t have to die because there will never be another you and me.
I would like to believe we’ve still got some juice in us, but maybe, as Tony Soprano says, “the best is over.”