I’m wondering if invoking the ends justify the means argument to support why it’s ok to use AI in creative endeavours is a little extreme. I was reading Moody Warlock‘s blog post last night about using AI for DND worldbuilding. His main argument against the use of AI is that there is no blood, sweat, and tears involved in the process. That using AI is a shortcut to the end result. For him the journey to the end is the main point. For him, if there is no struggle, then the end is hollow. This is what conjured up the ‘ends justify the means’ idea in my head. For me, if a DM creates a brilliant campaign that their players enjoy, then in my mind, what does it matter if they used AI or not in the worldbuilding? The point, or the end, is the players having a great gaming experience. Folks like to lean into the idea that creativity equals originality. That an artist, writer, or DM has to conjure up a story or a piece of art out of thin air. They forget that Shakespeare was the original remix artist. A lot of Shakespeare’s work was built from existing stories, chronicles, myths, poems, and older plays. In modern language, you could absolutely say he remixed. He borrowed plots, characters, situations, legends, and historical material, then transformed them through language, structure, psychology, theatrical pacing, and emotional depth. For example, Romeo and Juliet was not an original plot. Shakespeare drew heavily on Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which was itself part of a longer chain of Italian and French versions of the story. His Roman plays — Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus — drew from Plutarch’s Lives. His English history plays and Macbeth drew heavily from Holinshed’s Chronicles. The Folger notes Shakespeare’s reliance on Holinshed and Plutarch as major source texts. Othello comes from Cinthio’s Italian tale Un Capitano Moro / “A Moorish Captain.” Shakespeare follows the basic plot, but changes its moral atmosphere, invents or reshapes characters, and makes Iago into one of literature’s great engines of psychological manipulation. Hamlet also existed before Shakespeare. The story goes back to the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, recorded by Saxo Grammaticus and later retold by François de Belleforest. Shakespeare’s genius was not that he invented “prince must avenge murdered father”; it was that he turned the revenge tale into a philosophical drama about consciousness, delay, grief, performance, corruption, and being itself. So yes: Shakespeare was a remix artist. But in his world that was normal. Renaissance writers didn’t worship originality in quite the same way modern culture often does. They valued imitation, adaptation, transformation, and rhetorical brilliance. The question wasn’t always, “Did you invent the story?” It was, “What did you do with it?” That’s the real Shakespearean magic: he took already-circulating material and made it feel inevitable. He didn’t just copy old stories. He metabolised them. He turned borrowed plots into living theatre. I’m not invoking Shakespeare to justify copy-and-pasting from AI. I’m saying if a DM has an idea and they use AI to bring that idea to life for their players, then why care if they used AI to get there? We’ve seen this argument before: a new technology arrives and appears to threaten an existing way of life. Photography versus painting comes to mind. When the camera entered the scene, some painters dismissed photographs as mechanical, soulless, and requiring no real skill. The argument was simple: anyone could point a camera and press the shutter. The machine did all the work. But once artists began using the camera, something became clear. Put a camera in the hands of a layperson and you may get a good picture. Put a camera in the hands of an artist and you can get art. Generative AI has ushered in its own existential crisis for humanity. But that is another story.