AI and the Death of Originality: When the Internet Starts Eating Its Own Tail

Try this experiment: ask your favorite AI to summarize an article. That article? Written by another AI. Which summarized yet another AI’s version of something a human once wrote years ago. What you get isn’t knowledge—it’s leftovers reheated until they lose all flavor.

That’s where we are now: the web chewing on itself, one “helpful” summary at a time.

Once upon a time, the internet was gloriously chaotic. It was alive with bad jokes, weird obsessions, half-baked theories, and people arguing at 2 a.m. because they cared enough to. It wasn’t efficient. It was human.

Now, the mess is gone. Everything’s tidy, legible, drained of pulse. We’ve entered the beige era—content so polite it could pass for background noise.

The Great Thought Laundry

We call it productivity, but really, it’s thought laundering. Every new pass through an algorithm strips away another layer of personality. Sharp opinions become “balanced perspectives.” Passion turns into phrasing. What’s left reads fine but says nothing.

A thousand models scrape the same data, remix the same conclusions, and sell us the illusion of variety. It’s originality by committee, served lukewarm.

Creativity, Drowned but Not Dead

Here’s the punchline: AI isn’t killing creativity. It’s suffocating it under sameness. When every artist uses the same machine for “inspiration,” we end up with echoes of echoes. The ghost of an idea wearing a new coat of words.

But real originality doesn’t vanish—it hides. It waits for contrast. In a field of digital beige, a messy human sentence suddenly glows neon. The odd phrasing, the weird tangent, the risky metaphor—that’s where life leaks back in.

The Real Question

So maybe the issue isn’t whether originality survives. It’s whether we still have the nerve to sound alive. To write something that doesn’t fit a template. To make a mistake on purpose.

Because the more the machines polish, the more we’ll crave the unpolished.

And the next time you skim a perfect AI summary of another AI summary, remember: you’re not learning—you’re watching the web digest itself.

Slowly. Neatly. With bullet points.