Stay relevant, be original.
Dan Murphy, December 14 2025
Copy cats
I wanted to write my own kind of story, and had I started then, I would have written his.
- Stephen King
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
- Peter Thiel
To this day I distinctly remember a specific passage from Jonathan Safran Foer’s masterpiece Everything is Illuminated, a book I haven’t read in about ten years.
It’s an intense, horrifying depiction of a massacre during the Holocaust.
Foer intentionally disintegrates his prose from a mostly lighthearted and corky dialogue early in the novel, into a slur of words jammed together without any punctuation, space, or structure.
The scene is intense enough that I won’t include it here, but it’s in the chapter “Illumination” towards the end of the book if you’re curious.
The sudden change in style is striking, and your heart speeds up as the words get jammed closer and closer together.
The point is, I had never read anything like it.
Where’s the new training material going to come from?
If you ask an LLM to produce a similar effect, it can. The models have been trained on material such as this book, and so that they know how to produce their own flavor of it isn’t unsurprising.
But by definition LLMs have not been trained on tomorrow’s version of Everything is Illuminated, the next highly original novel, piece of research, algorithm, or formula.
Despite this, they may still produce original content, but who can prompt the model in a way that would lead to such an output?
And who can know whether the output really was a novel contribution to the field or just an uninspired rehashing of the status quo?
Only a person with taste and deep expertise in that domain, intent on creating something different and valuable.
I think this gets at an important truth about the world today: the closer you are to truly novel work, the more differentiated and relevant you’ll be.
Of course this has always been true.
In writing his magnum opus, The Dark Tower, Stephen King was inspired by The Lord of The Rings. But he knew he didn’t want to copy it:
Hobbits were big when I was nineteen … But although I read the books in 1966 and 1967, I held off writing.
I responded (and with rather touching wholeheartedness) to the sweep of Tolkien’s imagination—to the ambition of his story—but I wanted to write my own kind of story, and had I started then, I would have written his.
That, as the late Tricky Dick Nixon was fond of saying, would have been wrong. Thanks to Mr. Tolkien, the twentieth century had all the elves and wizards it needed.
In counsel to aspiring entrepreneurs Peter Thiel says:
The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
…
That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
In finance Ray Dalio reminds us that to beat the market you have to bet against the consensus of many smart people, and be right.
You get the idea. Original thinking has always paid dividends.
LLMs as a forcing function
But it’s perhaps more true now than ever because anything unoriginal is increasingly automatable by an LLM. If your writing, your coding, your thinking is cookie cutter, why does anyone need you to do it?
This doesn’t mean being different for being different’s sake, that everything must be a radical departure from the norm to be worthwhile.
It also doesn’t mean that LLMs can’t assist you in doing novel work.
But it does mean the closer you are to the cutting edge and the further from blind adherence to the status quo, the less able an LLM is to do your work for you.
A PhD contributing novel research or algorithms to fields of active study is harder to replace than a software developer cranking out React components for web UIs (not that this is trivial work! It’s just that LLMs are really good at it).
A writer spitting out the latest carbon copy of Game of Thrones may as well hand the reins over to Claude, while someone trying to produce something original will find limited help from LLMs.
AI maximalists will tell you the model can help you brainstorm, but I’ll be surprised if the next noteworthy creative achievement comes from some variation of asking “give me 20 really WILD directions I can take this!”. A long walk in the woods might be more useful.
On a less grand scale, most of us won’t be novelists or PhDs, so how can you practice original thinking in your daily life?
One prerequisite for original thinking in any field is the willingness to pause, reflect, and at times disagree. In software development if a feature request comes in it’s easier today than ever before to implement it - sic Claude Code on it and go make a cup of coffee.
It’s far more difficult psychologically to question the request, reflect on why it might be coming up, and reason about the best path forward from first principles.
The same method can be applied almost universally because it deals with hardwired parts of human behavior.
We don’t like to expend energy thinking deeply about complex topics, and it’s unpleasant to speak up against whatever the group consensus is - if you can even catch yourself going along with it.
In a world where execution of knowledge work is increasingly cheap, the importance of considered human judgement and the willingness to stop the assembly line in order to voice that judgement is more valuable than ever. This is King taking his pause in between reading Tolkien and writing The Dark Tower.
Because of this LLMs may be a healthy forcing function for creativity and originality, pushing us to step back and think for ourselves a little more than we do today.
Write your story, not his
None of us are truly original. We’re all influenced by who and what came before us - this blog certainly quotes enough smart people to demonstrate that.
Everything is Illuminated surely was influenced consciously and unconsciously by a great many authors and works that came before it.
But there is a vast gulf between someone who breaks from conventionality in an effective and enduring way, and someone who does not.
Sorry to all of the Tolkien-imitating-elf-and-dwarf-having fantasy authors, you’re not Stephen King.
We’d all be well served to take King’s advice and take the time necessary to channel our inspiration into something that’s truly our own.