> But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
But this is how culture works I think. It's not the act of copying or rearranging or borrowing but how the material is being processed and what drives the change I think.
Culture is also an expression of real-world concerns and values held by those who create it. AI-vangelists will say “all art is copied” over and over again to justify generating their slop, but no matter how many times you ask them, you’ll never get an answer to the question “What is a single great work of art that did not represent a single real-world value of its creator?”
See also: various defining works of ancient Greek literature featuring the same characters, that are almost certainly fanfics of earlier works, like the Telegony.
Culture has been reworking existing culture since the idea of culture existed.