I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I’m curious what the the Artificial Intelligence community says. We now have AI tools that can generate music, video, images, and text from scratch. In theory, this is the most democratized creative power humans have ever had. Anyone can make something genuinely new. But what’s actually happening is the opposite. The overwhelming default behavior is to use these tools to copy what already exists. There’s an entire cottage industry right now of people building automated pipelines to clone viral content. The workflow is basically: find what’s already going viral → feed it into AI → have AI generate a similar-clone → post it as your own content. Rinse, repeat, at scale. And it’s not just video. AI music tools can now compose in any genre, blend styles never combined before, and produce full arrangements from your lyrics. But the product category that’s actually exploding? “Similar song generators”. Upload a track, then AI spits out something that captures the same vibe. The creative possibility space is infinite, but the market demand is for a clone button. What fascinates me psychologically is that these people aren’t lazy or stupid. Many of them are technically sophisticated. They’re building automation workflows, writing complex code, chaining multiple AI services together. That’s real engineering effort. But all of that ingenuity is directed toward one goal: mimick what already exists. There’s research ( Horner & Whiten, 2005 ) showing that children will faithfully copy even clearly unnecessary steps in a demonstrated task. Joseph Henrich argues this “over-imitation” is actually adaptive. It’s how cumulative culture works. You copy the successful hunter’s entire routine because you can’t yet tell which steps matter. Is this the same instinct operating when someone reverse-engineers a viral video? My questions: Is there research on why humans default to imitation over innovation even when the cost of innovation drops to near zero? Does lowering the barrier to creation actually increase copying behavior because it removes the friction that used to force people into originality? (since copying used to be just as hard as creating) I’d love to hear everyone’s opinion. Relevant book recommendations would be great. submitted by /u/ChewyOnTheInside
Originally posted by u/ChewyOnTheInside on r/ArtificialInteligence