All authors are influenced – consciously or unconsciously – by what they have read or seen before. In fact, this has often been seen as one of the defining features of literary creation. Seneca the Younger argued that, just as bees make honey and wax from the pollen of flowers they leave behind, so writers should craft new works from the materials they encounter in their reading. As T.S. Eliot wryly put it, ‘immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. This being so, can we really draw such a line between literary borrowing and AI-powered appropriation?