Lots of people who pretend to be ostriches. :DDD And the really, really sad thing is that they can't even steal proper things, they steal the shit. Just like when yters and tiktokkers copy every stupid thing from each other, without thinking about it for 3 seconds. Total decline.

> At the beginning of my career, I believed I’d be rewarded for the originality of my ideas. The truth is that you’re rewarded for identifying and solving problems efficiently.

The "I'll be original and get directly rewarded" vision is indeed naive.

However, sometimes you get to a point in which you design original ideas precisely so they will be stolen, and making that work for you is part of the design.

Technically, everything is stealing and everyone is stealing others work, you might use an open source software, might build your own but uses someone else’s libraries, might take someone’s UI design like OP, someone might use someone’s components, dig deeper and someone is using the icons to build components, dig deeper and someone’s is using a software with builtin tools trained to make similar icons to others, really, there’s no bottom to it. And if you decide to reinvent the whole wheel from the little details, you definitely will have so many bugs and issues, and most likely no one will likes it because it’s fundamentally different than how they are used to use XYZ.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Plagiarists also steal.

OK, Benjamin.

This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

I looked up stealing to ground this comment of mine:

> stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice

I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments about copying someones digital creation doesn't really mean you took what they had from them, you just made a copy, though this doesn't logically apply to if I also physically stole someones product and made a copy since copyright/patent protection likely applies)

Don't do this. It's really a terrible idea. He's comparing Virgil Abloh being asked to create an evolution of the Air Force 1 and blatantly ripping off an already boring website (and in the same product category, no less). The two have nothing in common, obviously. You should build your own identity, and you do this by understanding your customers. If you want to create a boring copy of already existing work, well that's what we have LLMs for.

That said, we all take influence from the work of others who we admire. If you're going to steal, take the parts you like best from 10 different projects, improve every single one, and recombine them in a new way. That's how artists "steal".

and this is why artists get up in arms about AI is because they know they are guilty of stealing and that all of their work is largely just inspirations upon inspirations and now they have to compete with AI

It reminds me of this old country song:

    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major
    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major

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