And for a long time, that was comforting. It took the pressure off.
But recently, the vibe has shifted. "Stealing" feels different now that we have machines doing the heavy lifting for us.
The Sweat Equity of Inspiration
Here’s the thing about the old way of stealing: it was hard work.
If I wanted to write a story that sounded like Stephen King, I had to actually read Stephen King. I had to sit there, absorb his rhythm, and then struggle to type out my own version. And in that struggle, in the gap between my taste and my actual ability, that’s where "me" happened. My version of Stephen King would inevitably be different because I have my own weird biases, my own vocabulary, and my own flaws.
That friction is what made it art.
AI removes the friction. If I tell ChatGPT to "write a horror intro in the style of Stephen King," it doesn't struggle. It doesn't have a bad day. It just predicts the next most likely word based on a mathematical average of every horror story ever digitized.
It feels less like an homage and more like a parlor trick. It’s like buying a cake mix versus baking from scratch, sure, the result is edible, but can you really brag that you made it?
The "Soul" Problem
The reason Steal Like an Artist worked as a philosophy was that it honored the source. When you hear a guitar riff in a rock song that sounds like Chuck Berry, it’s a nod to history. You can trace the lineage. It’s a conversation between the past and the present.
AI is different because it’s a black box. It takes everything, Shakespeare, Reddit threads, news articles, your aunt’s blog, throws it into a blender, and pours out a smoothie. You can’t taste the individual ingredients anymore. You can’t honor the source because the source has been pulverized.
That’s why a lot of us feel icky about it. It’s not just that the robot is faster; it’s that it’s stripping away the context. It’s "content" without the history.
So, Where Is the Line?
I don’t think the answer is to ban the tools. That ship has sailed, and honestly, AI is helpful for brainstorming.
But I think the new ethical line comes down to how much of you is left in the final piece.
If you are using AI to generate a rough outline, and then you spend three hours rewriting it, injecting your own memories, your own jokes, and your own perspective? That’s still art. You’re using a tool to get past the blank page.
