Many people love stories of fantastical settings with magic and monsters. For that reason Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series was a massive hit, practically reinventing the fantasy genre and creating an captivating world with such memorable and original settings. However, what if the core concepts for Lord of the Rings wasn’t just borrowed, but stolen from someone else? The ancient greek philosopher Plato is known to have come up with different concepts meant to question people. One such thought was called the Ring of Gyges. The story is that a farmer named Gyges finds a ring that has the ability to turn him invisible, so that no matter what he does, no one will notice him. Plato used this to ask if certain moral rules still applied to Gyges just because he was invisible. The story ends with Gyges going mad with power and greed from the ring. This story is practically the same as the story of the One Ring from the popular Lord of the Rings series. While both stories are the same in their core concepts, and one was clearly inspired from the other, can it still be said that the Lord of the Rings is a original idea, when compared to the Ring of Gyges?
Many people have legal, philosophical, and scientific discussions about how to find if an idea can be considered original. In the past people had to get their inspiration from what they had around them but now if anyone wanted inspiration they could use the internet to get as much information as they want. If inspiration is taken from other sources, and everyone always generates new ideas it might not take long for humanity to run out of ideas, and even if new ideas are made, other people might have already thought of them. Even this title, which I have never been explicitly told, has been used in other articles and by other people. It is possible that no idea is original and that it is just a remix of other ideas.
A more mathematical approach is to find out the limit of ideas that can be made on a specific topic. While it probably won’t be an exact number, it is hypothetically possible to find the limit of ideas that can be created, which would be at an upper level of infinity when considering every single possible variable possible. This can be called the algebraic resolution. There are even more arguments of originality when computers can now use algorithms and artificial intelligence, to run through those hypothetical number and generate as many ideas, as there are grains of sand on a beach. If computers can create ideas are those ideas original to the computer?
As a fan of the tabletop game known as Dungeons & Dragons I have thought of many ideas for personal games with friends. While I did not plagiarize any stories, I still find many of the stories and characters I considered original have been done before, in ways almost identical to the stories I have made. I don’t think any idea can be called original. Outside influences always affect the mind, and where an idea may have come independently to one, someone else may have also come to the exact same conclusions. Steve Jobs was a fan of this saying, quoting it from Pablo Picasso. As a popular saying goes;“Good artists copy; great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso
Originality is dead, but that is not a completely bad thing. The saying means to take good ideas and make them better, rather than just copying an idea to make more of the same.
Leave a Reply