What is originality but the life of a human from conception to mortification?

As an aspiring writer, one of my greatest concerns is the “originality” of my story. I do not want to plunge my hands into the basket of tropes, only to pull out the usual candied tropes that have been marketed and written to absolute death…. Nor do I want my prose to sound flat and predictable, identical to the usual writing suspects.

In the age of AI and Learning Language Models, I went through periods of optimism and dread because—at least right now—truly organic writing with visible tone, imagery, and mood—still eludes this technology. While Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein has been labeled as 100% AI when tested with authenticity, the reality is that most modern writers do not write like 19th century novelists and poets. I believe it is safe to say that so long as artificial, algorithmic, and simple prose exists, and so long as people continue to generate ideas using AI, it is easy to remain somewhat original so long as we keep a safe distance. The catch is that we cannot be perpetually inspired by artificial, algorithmic, and simple prose.

I feel like I am always in a desperate dash to get rid of spoon-fed writing and tropes. While there are certainly components of the former we have ditched, I find that resilience in this world of artificiality will promote golden standards of art. True artistic visions will become priceless as we seek human connection over spoon-fed generic content. Hyper-realism, for example, appears to be the “gold standard” shown in artificially generated images. However, it ignores that reality that stylized art, imperfection, and the soul of the message is what truly brings the piece to life. Artificial art also displays quite a bit of same-face syndrome. Other than perhaps skin tone, eye color, and hair style, there is a same-ness to many portraits.

Perhaps in the context of art, originality is resilience, and resilience is originality. And, although we might be drawn to markets and wish to monetize every aspect of our art (and this is not inherently evil), a part of the soul is chipped away when the destination is a fat bank account over human connection.