dont be a copycat

know what makes you unique

be a pilotcat lol

i’ve been watching people make content on the internet for a while now. and for the most part, copying doesn’t bother me. same hook structure, same trending audio, same transition style. fine. that’s how any creative ecosystem evolves. you see something that works, you learn from it, you move on.

but something shifted when i noticed two creators recommending the same things, in the same tone, on the same music, with the same visual language. not just the same niche. the same everything. and i remember thinking: there should be a difference here. somewhere. in something.

because that’s not copying a format. that’s copying taste.

and those are not the same thing.

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stealing like an artist vs copying like an algorithm

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

austin kleon wrote a whole book called “steal like an artist”, arguing that nothing is original, that every creative person is a sum of their influences, and that the job is to collect widely and let those things transform into something new.

but i think there’s a line it doesn’t draw, and it’s the one that actually matters.

kleon is talking about influence. about absorbing lata mangeskar and your father’s handwriting and that one film you watched at 2am and letting all of it quietly become part of how you see. that’s how taste gets built. slowly, privately, from a thousand different directions.

what the internet is doing is different. it’s not stealing like an artist. it’s copying like an algorithm. same references, same sounds, same aesthetic shorthand, recycled through thousands of accounts until nobody can trace where it started or remember why it felt interesting in the first place.

stealing like an artist makes your taste richer. copying what’s trending makes it thinner. and that distinction is everything.

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what taste actually is

taste is the specific combination of everything you’ve consumed, experienced, loved, rejected, and quietly decided matters. it’s why two people can shoot in the same location and come back with completely different photographs. it’s why you can read two articles on the same topic and feel one of them and not the other.

it’s the books you return to not because they’re critically acclaimed but because something in them recognised you. it’s the specific kind of light you find beautiful and can’t fully explain. it’s the music you put on when nobody is watching, not the playlist you share. it’s the things you notice in a room that nobody else mentions. the sentence in an article that stops you completely while everyone else scrolled past it. the film that wrecked you that everyone else found just okay.

taste is not what you consume. it’s what stays. what accumulates quietly over years into a specific way of seeing that belongs entirely to you. and that’s exactly why it cannot be copied. you can copy someone’s playlist. you cannot copy the thirty years of experience that made those songs mean something to them. you can copy someone’s aesthetic. you cannot copy the exact life that made them find that beautiful and not something else.

taste is the thing that makes you irreplaceable. and it should be different for everyone. not similar. not shared. different.

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what is actually worth protecting

riding the wave will get you on the platform. but scraping off everything that makes you YOU, just to stay on it, is too high a price. you’ll blend in perfectly and nobody will remember you were there.

the creators who last are the ones who stayed specific enough that the algorithm couldn’t fully absorb them. their taste was too particular to be replicated. and that particularity is exactly why people stayed.

so steal like an artist. collect influences from everywhere. let them collide and transform into something nobody else could have made.

just don’t let the internet tell you what to collect.

because the moment your taste starts looking like everyone else’s, you haven’t found your people. you’ve just found the crowd.

and the crowd was never going to remember your name anyway.

taste is the only thing that was ever entirely yours. protect it like it.

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