Opening page…
When does an idea become yours?
An AI gives you the same opinion it gives thousands of others. Is it yours?
You can inherit an idea without having done the work of making it your own.
Your answer
A little context
You ask a chatbot what it makes of a news story, and the answer is careful and sensible. A day later you hear yourself saying it at dinner, and you mean it. Thousands of other people got much the same answer that week, and some of them are saying it at their dinners too.
Nearby questions
- Mastery or possessionWhen something good comes out of you, is it yours — or are you the mouth for something you don't understand?
- Why did the Chippu paint the Deucalion myth at the Laurel Bridge?The Manager let one Chippu dress the Laurel Bridge. Under its fountain he painted Ovid's flood, where two survivors throw stones over their shoulders and the stones become people, and each time it ends he washes it off the wall and paints it again.
- Is a thing worth more because it was hard to make?We prize the handmade and the hard-won. If a machine made the same thing in a second, ask what, if anything, would be missing from it.
- Can a machine have an original idea?Ada Lovelace wrote that her engine could originate nothing, only do what it was ordered to. Machines now turn up things no person has seen.
- If anyone can make anything in seconds, will anyone still be seen?The ability to produce does not guarantee that anyone has time to receive what is made.
