Anyone who's done text similarity at scale never believed in originality
RexDouglass · x · 2026-09-23
Drawing on hands-on experience with large-scale text similarity, the author argues originality is illusory: content has always been copied, permuted and remixed thousands of times with slight mutations, and LLMs merely do what humans do — transparently, with a record. In a reply, he pushes back on the nostalgic myth of authentic authorship: genuine authorship died long before LLMs, and its revival as a baseline is marketing meant to differentiate "patriotic made-in-America tokens" from overseas models.
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