Made You Look, Made You Steal.

TikTok lives in the remix. Sounds, memes, voiceovers, looped video, layered, reinterpreted, random.

Is that a part of its power? It’s built on shared language. A wink here. A re-edit there. One trend creates another and the result is a vibrant, fast moving creative culture where nothing is original, and everything is.

But here’s the tension for me....when does a remix become a complete ripoff?

Were is the gray zone?

On one side you’ve got creators building on a moment, giving credit, adding value, collaborating.

On the other side, full-on theft...ideas lifted wholesale, aesthetics copied, captions and concepts cloned without attribution.

The tricky bit with all this, is it all looks the same and who would know as TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t really care who made it first, it cares about who made it perform. Originality gets outrun by optimisation. And small original creators often get left behind as others thrive from what they started.

It made me think...This isn’t a content problem. It’s a culture problem.

“The tension for me is when does a remix become a complete ripoff?”

If everything becomes remixable, do we lose track of authorship entirely? Or is this just the next evolution of creativity?...Where ownership is less about who did it first, and more about who does it best?

It’s not black and white. But maybe that’s the point.