It's All Derivative

The creativity of both AI and humanity. Grill A Christian (Sep 2025).

When I was first contemplating a response to this month’s essay prompt, I immediately scoffed and thought to myself, “Obviously the difference between human beings and generative AI is the ability to be creative. AI can only replicate and repackage what it already knows.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that replicating and repackaging information is all any of us knows, humans included.

As so-called creatives, we writers tend to be thought of as one of two ways: either we’re derivative because we create work that’s clearly based on someone else’s, or we’re original because people perceive our work to be something they haven’t seen before. If I were a screenwriter being hired to write a remake or reboot of a classic film, or to come up with the screenplay for the next film in the Fast & Furious franchise, I might be considered a “derivative” writer. On the other hand, if I write a literary fiction or fantasy novel that I invented out of whole cloth, I’d probably be considered “original” because there isn’t a preexisting work that someone can point to and say, “Oh, it’s clearly based on that other thing.”

The inherent misconception in that dichotomy, however, is that the “original” work is still derivative; it just isn’t quite as obvious. Ultimately, everything humans create is derivative of what has come before. We don’t invent things from nothing; we invent them from the sum total of our knowledge, experiences, opportunities, perceptions, and insights in the world.

For example, people might look at very unique, inspired book series like Game of Thrones from George R.R. Martin, or The Dark Tower from Stephen King, and think, “Wow, what original stories!” But both authors have cited J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings trilogy as inspiration for those works. And Tolkien has, in turn, cited his personal experiences serving during World War I, his childhood in the English countryside, and his lifelong fascination with mythology and folklore as inspiration for his most famous work. He also worked elements of his Christian faith, his expertise in the study of languages, and his love for geographic landscapes into his books as well.

We are all, essentially, just reconfiguring and reconstituting what we already know into something new. If we find unique enough combinations of influences, it appears original. But it’s not original.

The only being in the entire history of the universe who is truly original, who undeniably created something from nothing, is God. It says so right there in the very first line of the Bible. In Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” There was nothing in all of existence other than God, until He created the heavens and the earth, day and night, water and sky, land and sea, vegetation, animals, humans, etc. And what humans have been doing ever since the dawn of time, is looking at God’s creation and figuring out different ways of interpreting and presenting it.

So I realized it was a little disingenuous to take a stand on human creativity and ingenuity and claim that’s the difference between us and AI. The emerging technology we know as AI is just doing what we’ve been doing for millennia, in a fraction of the time.

That said, the one thing that generative AI cannot do is think outside the box, both literally and figuratively. A man versus machine matchup is never going to end well when you’re competing in an area where the machine has home field advantage (i.e., raw computational power, data analysis, etc.). But there are areas where humans have a “home field advantage” and that’s in our ability to connect and empathize with one another.

If you lose a loved one, you can have a generative AI model synthesize all the latest psychological research on grief. You can have it summarize a bunch of self-help books on dealing with loss and simply them into major bullet points. You can even have it spin up a chatbot so you can talk through your feelings. But the one thing it can’t do is sit down with you, give you a hug, and say, “I’ve been there. I know what it feels like. And I’m so deeply sorry for your loss.”

Maybe all that will change twenty-five years from now. Maybe generative AI will become so adept at figuring out what humans need that they can reduce the “uncanny valley” — the phenomenon where an artificial construct appears human but is off just enough to create a feeling of unease — down to an acceptable enough margin that most people won’t be able to tell the difference. But until that time has come, I think we’ll still need writers to give voice to the larger themes of connection and empathy that machines can’t feel, no matter how much training data and algorithmic programming they have.

At the end of the day, words are both an arrangement of letters on a page in a specific order, and a powerful tool that can carry so much more weight and impact and meaning beyond the text itself. AI will always be great at processing the letters on a page in a specific order. But humans are better (at least for now!) at applying and interpreting that implied meaning, which is why I think AI will always struggle with tasks like inspiring others, bringing them together, or creating a shared culture or vision.


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PROMPT: The Word & AI: Revelation, Creativity, and Human Connection in the age of robots & supercomputers. September’s contest dives into this theme all month long. Across major religions, sacred texts reveal and remind us of the divine, preserving the good news we share. Earth’s libraries overflow with our reflections on God, life, hopes, and dreams. Platforms like Writing.com celebrate human creativity, inspiring stories that capture the full spectrum of our shared experience. Today’s AIs can flawlessly quote every book ever written and even craft polished, perfect prose of their own. So, has technology replaced the inspired human author? Can we still tell if our chat partner is a person or a machine? What will creative forums look like 25 years from now? Why do we still write? What unique spark do human authors bring? And are our words still more powerful than any AI could ever write in shaping culture and vision?

Written for "Grill a Christian"