None Of Your Ideas Are 100% Original

Hey friends, welcome back to Creator Etiquette™!

This week’s issue is a little different because it’s in partnership with Adobe Acrobat! As an Adobe Acrobat Ambassador, I’m partnering with Adobe to share tools I genuinely use in my business workflows, especially when it comes to organizing ideas, protecting my work, and actually running my creator business like a business.

This newsletter lives alongside the YouTube channel and the podcast for those who prefer reading over watching, and for the weeks when a video can't capture everything I want to say. If you’d rather listen in, make sure to follow along on YouTube and Spotify!

Today we’re getting into something that has been on my mind for a while: plagiarism and originality in the creator economy. Not the obvious, blatant copying, but the gray area that’s getting messier by the day.

If you’ve ever felt like someone “stole” your idea… we need to talk. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: there’s a very real chance your idea wasn’t 100% original to begin with. In a world where we’re all consuming the same content, using the same tools, and even asking the same AI prompts, overlap is inevitable.

The internet is a remix. It always has been. The real problem is that most creators aren’t thinking about ownership at all. If you’re not protecting your brand, your frameworks, your IP, you’re leaving everything up to chance. And when AI is trained on everything you’ve ever posted, that’s a risky game to play.

I fundamentally believe that they are not.

Anything you have ever thought of has likely been thought of by someone else before. Maybe they didn’t act on it. Maybe they did, but their delivery looked completely different from yours. That difference in delivery is what makes something feel new.

I have seen this scenario play out over and over again. One creator shares an idea, and shortly after, another creator posts something very similar. (Anyone remember Charlie D’Amelio’s going viral with Jalaiah Harmon’s renegade dance?) Sometimes it is inspiration. Sometimes it is intentional and sometimes it is the result of using the exact same tools to generate ideas.

I am not condoning plagiarism in any way. It is frustrating to put time and effort into something you are proud of and then see someone else replicate it. But the reality is, not everything that looks similar is plagiarism.

There are creators who openly say “use this idea.” There are trends where thousands of people use the same format but add their own perspective. There are educators literally teaching frameworks to be reused. At this point, the best practice is simple…if you are inspired by someone, credit them. It protects you, and it shows respect.

Tools like ChatGPT and others are trained on existing content, which means when creators ask similar questions, they can receive very similar outputs. So when two creators post similar videos, captions, or hooks, it raises a bigger question: are you using AI as a thought partner, or are you letting it think for you?

One of the ways I’ve been thinking about this more intentionally is actually through how I organize and refine my ideas behind the scenes. Inside Acrobat’s AI-powered PDF tools, I’ve been using structured prompts to break down my own ideas, refine messaging, and make sure what I’m putting out actually sounds like me, not like a generic output. Instead of copying and pasting something and calling it a day, I’m using AI to ask better questions and go deeper; and I am also using sources to research, and provide context so I actually know what my output is based on.

This is something I didn’t understand early in my career: your backend systems matter just as much as your content. If you don’t have a clear place to organize your ideas, your contracts, your drafts, your frameworks, it becomes really easy to lose track of what you’ve created and what actually belongs to you.

That’s why I’ve been using PDF Spaces inside Acrobat to bring everything into one place, everything from content drafts, brand deal notes, contracts, even early-stage ideas. Instead of digging through scattered docs and screenshots, I can actually see the full picture of what I’m building. When you start treating your ideas like assets instead of random posts, you show up differently as a creator.

If you are building a brand, you need to start taking your intellectual property seriously. That includes your frameworks, your concepts, and the way you package your ideas.

Once something is on the internet, it is no longer just yours in the way you might think it is. Unless you are protecting your work through trademarks, copyrights, or clear documentation, you are relying on best practices and good intentions. In a fast-moving digital environment, that is not always enough.

Even something as simple as keeping clean, organized, timestamped records of your work (your drafts, your finalized PDFs, your contracts) can make a difference in how you protect and present your ideas long term.

If this is something you’ve been struggling with feeling disorganized, unsure where your ideas live, or overwhelmed by the backend of your business, I highly recommend exploring some of the tools I mentioned above. They’ve genuinely helped me go from “everything is everywhere” to actually understanding and owning what I’m building.

You can explore more ways to use Acrobat in my workflow here!

No question this week, but I want yours. What do you most want to understand about building a sustainable creator business? Reply to this email or join the conversation in our Reddit community. I am reading every single one.

Next issue, we are getting into another hot topic: buying followers and verification. Tune in next week for some spicy takes.

Welcome to Creator Etiquette™. I am so happy you are here.

Xo, Gigi Robinson

Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom

You are receiving this because you signed up for Creator Etiquette™. Unsubscribe anytime, no hard feelings.