The wise king wrote: There is nothing new under the sun, which implies that no act of creation is made entirely void of a precedent — but the line between inspiration and imitation has been a very present question from time immemorial. Relationships have strained, litigations have raged, and institutions have been raised, all aimed at answering the question of whether a product was inspired or copied. In artistic and creative communities this becomes even more pertinent, given that a large part of the intellectual property developed is visual or visual-based. Combined with the rise in artificial intelligence, it has become very expedient to understand clearly the separation between an inspired IP and one that has been copied.
Acendiat on Reddit succinctly defines inspiration as a spark of creativity triggered by an external stimulus, which should in no way be merely the variation of that stimulus. In contrast, copying is the replication or mimicry of a subject without adding any new perspective or substantive change to the original. Observed closely, we may notice that inspiration and copying are fundamentally the same act at the beginning, and the distinction only becomes apparent at the stage of progression along the development journey. When inspiration occurs, the creator, prompted by that external stimulus, takes the concept or broad theme of the subject, pokes and prods at it to understand the underlying technique or essence, and evolves an application of that understanding into their own expression. Up until that evolution occurs, every work headed toward being inspired is, in its earliest state, indistinguishable from an imitation — the two are not separated by what triggers them, only by whether the creator ever moves past the trigger.
Most of everything we know how to do as humans, we learnt first by copying — from walking to talking, reading, writing, and all the other higher-order faculties and capacities we grow to develop. Being that nothing is new under the sun, every creator must, at some point, have studied a precedent to develop their craft, and imitation is usually how that learning begins. However, the problem with imitation, as beautifully captured by Carrie Brummer from Artist Strong, starts when the study stops at imitation. That stopping point is rarely a failure of talent; it is usually the safer choice, since a work that stays close to what has already been seen and validated carries less risk than one that ventures into what has only been understood. Recognisability sells in a way that originality has to be discovered.
In A Thing For Art Edition 3 we argued that in the process of developing a personal visual language, the guiding question should be whether your investigation of a reference or influence is generating new information rather than repeating a decision. This also applies here.
When you do something with only what you see, chances are high that you’ll end up with an imitation or a copy of the observed subject; when you do something with what you understand, the output will likely register as inspired — related enough to reflect the precedent’s influence, but evolved enough to offer something tangibly new. The general question to ask is: can you see your imagination distinctly in the work?
To grow out of creating imitations and into creating inspired work, the creative must reach a point where they are no longer dependent on the study’s decisions and particularities. Carrie again offers a useful way in: inspired work is one where exposure to the stimulus is mixed with understanding — understanding resolved from studying the influential creative decisions closely enough to grow out of dependence on them. Until that happens, the creation keeps coming off as a borrowed expression, no matter how much work is put into it. After getting inspired, the goal is to learn how the work works, so you can make your own informed decisions and develop your own voice. A simple framework toward that end is to move from studying the reference to learn how to make your work look or feel a certain way, to questioning and understanding why the work looks or feels that way, and finally to developing your own look and feel.
This is also where the arrival of artificial intelligence sharpens the question rather than complicating it, because a model can only ever work with what it has been shown. It has no capacity to poke and prod at an underlying essence, no understanding to resolve toward, and therefore no path from dependence on its training data to a voice of its own — it remains, by construction, permanently at the stage every human creator is meant to pass through and leave. This does not make its output any less convincing; it only means the test that has always separated inspiration from copying — was the resemblance produced by seeing, or by understanding — now applies to it with unusual clarity.
It is also the test that litigation and institutions keep reaching for without quite naming. Courts assess resemblance because resemblance is what can be measured, but resemblance was never the real question; what the wise king’s line about precedent leaves out is that everything resembles something, and always will. The actual question, in a courtroom or a curatorial studio alike, is the one that has run under everything above: whether the maker’s engagement with the precedent generated new information, or only repeated a decision. In conversations about inspiration and imitation, especially in the visual arts, we should hold to that standard and not brand every resemblance an infraction. Inspiration becomes copying only when the imitation is done without the studying, the thinking, and the questioning that develops aptitude and leads, eventually, to understanding.