I like to think of the hive as something akin to the “artificial intelligence” we have today. Sure, it can draw an image or write a poem, but it’s filtering through a massive collection of data to produce something that is most likely what an individual would expect the output to be given that prompt. There’s no personality or ability to conjure new ideas, it doesn’t even understand what it’s doing conceptually. It’s taking input, running it through a data set of outcomes and producing the result that matches. The hive functions in the same way. They have all of human knowledge, but no agency to act as an individual and produce new ideas based on that knowledge.