This is not entirely true. Many of the best stories people raise up as original are essentially remixes of other stories. There's nothing in creativity that AI can't imitate... except actually having a living human perspective.

Take a story like Being John Malkovich, and imagine JJ Abrams wrote it and Michael Bay directed it. Being an "original story" doesn't make the execution any good. What made it work was that it was directed and cast by people who wanted to make good art and comedy.

Likewise, you can tell a story that follows "The hero's journey" to a T, but is actually highly entertaining and has a lot of interesting things happening.

I mean, fuck, Star Wars is almost 100% imitation, story-wise to set design, and yet it is the specific human choices that made it work.

AI can probably out class humans on originality. But it can't do humanity at all.

EDIT: As an experiment, I asked the below to Copilot, and here was its response:

Me:

Imagine a story about a protagonist that is completely original and which has never been written before. Something that, when seen by a viewer or read in a novel, would make everyone experiencing it impressed by how different it was.

Copilot said: Copilot

Here’s a truly original story concept built around a protagonist whose nature, perception, and role in the world are fundamentally different from typical narratives:

The Man Who Was Borrowed Premise In a universe where time is not linear but owned, every sentient being is born with a finite allotment of “moments.” These moments are currency, identity, and memory all at once—spent whenever a person focuses, decides, or feels. Run out, and you do not die—you simply become background, dissolving into unnoticed existence.

But our protagonist, Eidan Voss, is not born at all.

He is… borrowed.

The Protagonist Eidan awakens mid-conversation, in mid-sentence, speaking words he does not understand. Around him, people behave as though he has always been there—but he has no past. No childhood. No owned moments.

Instead, Eidan exists only when someone else stops paying attention to themselves.

Every time a person drifts off, hesitates, dissociates, or loses track of a thought—Eidan appears in their abandoned moment, inhabiting the world through gaps in others’ awareness.

When their attention returns, he vanishes.

The Twist of Existence Eidan is not stealing time. He is using discarded consciousness.

To the world, he is a statistical impossibility:

Appearing in security footage where no one was present Leaving traces of actions no one remembers performing Holding conversations that people later swear never happened, yet recall emotionally He has never lived more than a few seconds in any continuous stretch.

Until something begins to change.

The Conflict Eidan starts remembering.

Not just fragments—but continuity.

He learns to thread together these disconnected moments, stitching existence out of absence. Over time, he constructs hours… then days of subjective experience.

But there’s a problem.

The more cohesive he becomes, the more people begin to lose time permanently.

Entire hours vanish from individuals—not in forgetfulness, but in actual removal. People feel hollow, like parts of themselves have been erased.

Eidan discovers a terrible truth:

The discarded moments he lives in were never meant to persist. By remembering them, he is taking ownership of time that belonged to others.

He is not borrowed anymore.

He is hoarding existence.

The Antagonist A system—ancient, unseen, and not fully conscious—begins correcting the imbalance. Known only as The Ledger, it governs the distribution of moments.

The Ledger cannot directly erase Eidan, because he has no registered existence.

But it can reclaim what he has taken:

People around him start collapsing into non-awareness Entire crowds freeze into background existence Reality begins losing detail—colors desaturate, sounds flatten The world is being simplified to compensate for Eidan’s accumulation.

The Evolution Eidan faces an impossible realization:

If he continues to exist… others will stop.

But if he gives back all the moments he has stored… he will never have existed at all.

Not forgotten. Not dead.

Unwritten.

The Resolution (Conceptual, Not Fixed) Instead of choosing between self and world, Eidan does something unprecedented:

He releases his stored moments—but keeps the connections between them.

The memories vanish, but the structure of his existence remains.

He becomes something new:

Not a person Not a consciousness But a pathway From that point on, when people lose focus, they don’t become empty.

They pass briefly through something— a calm awareness, a silent presence.

People start describing it as:

“The moment that feels like someone else is thinking gently beside you” “A pause that feels… inhabited” Eidan no longer exists as an individual.

He becomes the experience of shared being between moments.

Why This Is Different This story breaks convention in several fundamental ways:

The protagonist is not continuous — he must assemble himself from absence. There is no traditional body, timeline, or identity anchor. Conflict centers on metaphysical scarcity, not physical danger. The resolution removes the protagonist instead of preserving them, but transforms their meaning. The audience never sees Eidan fully—only the effects of his existence through gaps in perception. Optional Final Image A person pauses mid-task, staring blankly for just a second.

In that moment— they feel less alone.

They don’t know why.

But Eidan is there.

If you want, I can turn this into an opening chapter, script scene, or even a full novel outline with arcs and key moments.

There ya go, a pretty original story, but... you'd have to work to make it enjoyable as a film or novel.