Text-similarity researcher Rex Douglass: LLM writing isn't plagiarism—originality was always an illusion

On Sept 23, Rex Douglass, a researcher with hands-on experience in large-scale text-similarity computation, posted a thread arguing that calling LLM-assisted writing plagiarism is itself a recycled meme. His central claim: originality is an illusion, and LLMs merely do more transparently—and with a visible record—what humans have always done.

Confirmed

Drawing on large-scale text-similarity work, he argued that culture itself evolves through memes being copied thousands of times, rearranged, remixed, and slightly mutated; human brains constantly repeat memes too, they just leave no trace, while LLMs do.
He claimed human text being predictable is precisely why LLMs work: people spend their lives lightly rewriting others' sentences to dodge plagiarism, and humanity doing this simultaneously produces massive n-grams while genuinely new ideas remain rare.
He rejected nostalgic narratives of authentic creation, saying those resisting AI content are protecting a past that never existed—essentially protectionism against the next generation of competitors. Markets do not care whether content is LLM-generated, just as people never cared that humans shamelessly copy each other's memes.
He criticized academia for overestimating the authenticity of research output: almost no one does meta-science, so few realize most research is mediocre—derivative, imitative, vague, rushed—which happens to be an excellent baseline for LLMs.

Why it matters

This reframes the AI-plagiarism debate from whether machines plagiarize to whether human originality exists at all, offering an empirically grounded, counterintuitive defense of LLM-generated content and indirectly explaining why LLMs perform well on academic and research writing.

2026-09-23 ~ 2026-09-23 · 5 related posts

Primary sources

Text-similarity researcher: culture is memetic copying, so LLM 'plagiarism' ring hollow — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23 19:06 (UTC+08:00)
Researcher: most research output is terrible — and that's exactly why LLMs work — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23 19:32 (UTC+08:00)
Market doesn't care that content is LLM-generated, argues Rex Douglass — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23 19:38 (UTC+08:00)

Anyone who's done text similarity at scale never believed in originality — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23
[source] Text-similarity researcher: culture is memetic copying, so LLM 'plagiarism' ring hollow — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23
Researcher argues LLM 'plagiarism' critique is ironic: all humans regurgitate memes constantly — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23
[source] Researcher: most research output is terrible — and that's exactly why LLMs work — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23
[source] Market doesn't care that content is LLM-generated, argues Rex Douglass — RexDouglass · 2026-09-23