Once upon a time, a group of people decided to start a magazine. The group was thrilled and sought mentors. They found some and then got the necessary permissions.
Then started the real work- the collection of ideas and writers for the magazine. It wasn’t difficult to convince people to write, but most of the writing was either copied or excerpted.
As copying (or, as it is now called, plagiarism) grew, the idea of a magazine full of new ideas fizzled out. The mentors weren’t too keen on repackaging the information and the group that made the initial decision decided it was best not to go ahead.
This happened in my early school years.
I was one of the writers, charged up at the idea of contributing to a magazine. But no one said anything about NOT copying from sources. No one cared to talk about it, even when the magazine was dropped.
Copying from sources, or copying the entire source, was not a prohibited practice, at least in the 90s. How else was one to develop thought patterns, good writing or recognise good flow from not-so-good flow?
But it wasn’t vehemently encouraged either. Nor was there a fear of losing one’s voice in the process of copying others, pulling material and trying to sound like Shakespeare, for example.
Reflecting on those early days, I see a parallel in AI today. Like the writers before, AI compiles and recreates from multiple sources, only much faster.
Which alarms us… We can not catch up to it… We can not keep up. Essentially, it could create multiple magazines given the direction.
If this were to happen, it would mean facing an explosion of information, more than we may need, which prompts the question: Will we need bigger brains to process it?
Or do we need to niche so far down that children who once started with a broad education now start with niche learning, to manage this information overload?
Bigger brains??? Limited by biology. We would have evolved if we could.
However, the latter is slowly becoming a reality.
Schools, platforms and careers are increasingly nudging us toward hyper-specific lanes. Instead of starting as generalists who later specialise, there’s now a shift in mindset: creating specialists from the very beginning.
But there is a problem with this approach.
When everything becomes niche, the ability to connect ideas across domains starts to fade. And in a world overflowing with information, much of it generated, remixed and reassembled, the real skill may not be in knowing more, but in seeing or interpreting differently.
Come to think of it: maybe the problem was never copying.
Back then, we copied without questioning it enough. Today, machines do it because they know too much. The outcomes, nevertheless, look similar, but the intent and the opportunity are vastly different.
Maybe it’s not about bigger brains…. And we don’t need to outproduce machines.
We need to do what my school magazine couldn’t quite figure out:
Pause. Question. Add something that wasn’t there before.
Maybe the future doesn’t belong to those who can generate infinite content, but to those who can interrupt the noise…. with clarity and with their own perspective.
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