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The AI booster argument that "oh well, human writers are also influenced by other writers" is both insanely dumb and insanely insulting; kind of thing that should get you branded for life as a dolt.

LLMs are token-processing engines. *all they do* is take in tokenized input and spit out output. I say "input and output" because it's not even *language,* the *language* can only happen through human interpretation of those inputs and outputs, externally to the model.

Even if you're a delusional LLM-consciousness maximalist you have to concede that an LLM exists purely in a world of language. A human writer has a huge continuum of experiences that are *inaccessible through the pure ingestion of language-like symbols.*

That should be a very obvious and evident thing to observe! A human writer is not sourcing the entirety of what goes into their writing from other writing that they've read.

It's like thinking that reading is equivalent to eating the glue off the spines of books. It's not! It's just not.

Literary influence is a dynamic process. It's something you *undergo,* as a conscious being with a continuous sense of self, which resonates from the reading of texts, through to other disparate experiences, and into the production of texts.

An LLM cannot be said to be "influenced" by a text any more that the blueberries "influenced" my morning smoothie. It just has the text in its dataset.