Imitation and innovation are both important.

Innovation is trying something new that is unlike what others are doing.

Innovation very often doesn't work–at that point it's not innovation, but just variance that turned out to not work.

Innovation is expensive. It takes effort and focus.

Imitation is replicating a thing you've observed others do that is likely to work.

If it weren't likely to work, the other people you saw using it in similar contexts would stop doing it.

Imitation is what prevents humans from having to innovate all the time; once someone in society figures out a robust way to do something useful, we can simply do that in the future and take it for granted.

A kind of emergent caching of useful ideas.

In a system the force of imitation pulls us towards efficiency, the centroid.

In contrast, innovation expands the system's horizons.

Without innovation pushing the horizons out, the system pulls to an extreme, rigid, brittle, centroid.

A heat death of the system.

LLMs just imitate, following the innovation that humans that came before have done.

In a world where we use LLMs for more things, how can we make sure that we keep the innovation in balance?