The funny thing is that most creatives are quite open about their influences.

They wouldn't be if every named influence wanted a 5% cut of all future projects.

I wonder who was the first to claim this was plagiarism; ironically, everyone else seems to have mindlessly plagiarised their belief

95% of beliefs are shamelessly plagiarized from someone else.

AI isn't influenced. It doesn't have restrictions. It doesn't have to work within confines. AI can always remember the word it wants to use. It always can hit the note it intends. And it can hit every note. Etc. It uses the corpus of training data and mashes it into a new form.

Stephen King won't be able to remember every word of every story he's ever read. And if he wants to make something "Lovecraftian", it'll be what Stephen King thinks is Lovecraftian. And there will be something to that. Some bit he believes is more or less important than other people And those bits are what makes Stephen King, Stephen King.

Everyone has had access to the same material King read. Access to the same tools he used to create. Everyone had the chance to effectively be Stephen King. But there is just one. Because there is some unique bit of observation or recall or combination of such things that is unique to King.

And from what I've seen so far, these LLMs can't do that. There is a missing element of pure imagination.

You can tune AI output.

But you can't make it creative. You can't say "give me something cool" and have it produce something of note.

Yes, you can absolutely play god of the gaps.

How am I doing that? I am claiming that LLMs lack imagination. They are incapable of creating out of whole cloth or interpretation.

Saying they cannot create based off of a vague suggestion is very much in line with that claim. I consider it a vital difference between Stephen King being inspired and LLMs mashing training inputs together.