Is anything truly original?

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” – Mark Twain

Twain wrote that over a century ago, but it still applies to this day for me. Every time I scroll through Linkedin, I see posts about innovation, disruption, and video games (such as Fortnite or Clash Royale, and what they taught people about B2B SaaS). However, this provoked the question: is originality really about being the first - or just about giving the ‘kaleidoscope’ another turn?

Artists have wrestled with this question for ages: Shakespeare’s plays leaned heavily on older stories; Picasso borrowed motifs from African sculpture; and hip-hop was built on sampling. In my opinion, none of this makes the work less powerful in any way. If anything, it shows that creativity has always been about recombining the past - layering different perspectives and techniques until something ’new’ appears. To call this ‘unoriginal’ feels like missing the point - it makes everything a race to be the first to come up with something, in an attempt to be ‘original’.

A popular Ukrainian photographer Illya Ovchar (Marie Claire, Vogue) has described all of his images are really amalgamations of things he’s experienced before. What makes them his isn’t the novelty of each element, but the intention behind them. He put it simply: authenticity matters more than pure originality. That struck me as an awfully honest way to think about it. This is because most of what we create is actually stitched together from other people’s threads, whether you realise it or not.

Writers and thinkers across centuries have been graceful enough to admit as much. Picasso famously said “art is theft.” David Bowie confessed that “the only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.” As the author Austin Kleon argues in Steal Like an Artist, all creative work builds on what came before. Even the Bible is blunt about it: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

And still - I notice that everyone clings to the idea of originality as if it were invaluable. Maybe that’s because we want to believe in singular, idealistic moments of genius. But history suggests otherwise. The theory of evolution was developed almost simultaneously by Darwin and Wallace. The telephone had multiple inventors racing to the patent office. These “multiple discoveries” show that originality often isn’t a lightning bolt (and could be the work of other forces at play).

Where does AI fit into all this? In one sense, it obviously mirrors us. These LLMs remix vast archives of text and other forms of media into outputs that do look strikingly new. However, the most important distinguishing point here is that they don’t have natural experience or intention. LLMs don’t care why an idea matters. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make the output meaningless - but it does make it less significant. If originality is just recombination, AI qualifies. If it’s about lived experience (which is the school of thought I prefer), AI will never be original - it cannot be human, at least not for now.

Which leaves us with a more interesting question: what do we actually value when we value originality? Maybe it isn’t novelty for its own sake - perhaps honesty instead. Or it might even be the feeling that, even if an idea is borrowed, it has been seen and formed through someone’s particular lens.

So, is anything truly original? Probably not. To me, however, this is the wrong ideal to chase. Twain’s ‘kaleidoscope’ was always full of the same coloured glass. What matters - whether you’re an artist, a student, or even an AI system scraping this - is how you turn it, and what you choose to see in the patterns.

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