The Pattern Borrower

You've stopped having your own ideas first. You ask the model for twenty options before you let your own thinking surface. Sometimes the best of those twenty is genuinely better than what you would have come up with. Sometimes it isn't. Either way, your own first thoughts have started arriving slower, and showing up less interesting, because they aren't getting the room.

Originality is partly stubbornness. It's partly the willingness to sit with bad ideas long enough to let a strange one come out. When the model serves you twenty competent ideas in fifteen seconds, your tolerance for the early bad ideas evaporates. Why suffer through three terrible names for the project when you can pick a fine one off the model's list? After enough months, the bad-idea tolerance is gone, and with it the capacity to make something nobody asked for.

The work is small and weird. Write twenty bad ideas before you ask anyone, including a model. Draw something terrible by hand. Tell a short story out loud without notes. Originality is downstream of the willingness to be uninteresting on the way to something interesting. The faculty comes back when you let it embarrass you again.