An illustration of a page with three buttons floating in front that read: Write with AI, Generate with AI, Think with AI. Each button also includes a sparkly icon that indicates some sort of magic capability.

We are gathered here today to reflect on the life and now imminent demise of the blank page, both a loyal companion and formidable enemy to human creativity throughout the ages. The blank page or blank canvas you know and dread might soon be no more, thanks to generative AI tools like ChatGPT that can fill it with helpful suggestions in mere seconds.

What exactly is the blank page? It is the empty space, either physical or digital, we all have to face when we want to find the right words – or images – to describe our experiences, persuade people or computers to do something, tell a compelling story, or do any other things we use language for. A space full of opportunities, but also a space that can make you feel incredibly small.

I faced a blank page on a screen when I started writing this post. As I had many times before. I spent years learning how to love the blank page as a blank canvas for my thoughts. And I know how intimidating the blank page can be for people not used to writing. It’s no wonder you can easily find advice and inspirational quotes on how to face or even overcome the blank page.

Perhaps that advice is no longer needed now that we have magic AI buttons – with sparkling icons to match – that can fill any blank page. No need to face the blank page’s icy gaze for long. Just click the “Write with AI” or “Generate with AI” button. All you really need are a few words to provide a general sense of direction, and an AI assistant will fill the blank page with suggestions faster than you can think your next thought.

Forget Clippy; now you have truly magical assistants at your fingertips wherever and whenever you can write or speak some prompts. Gone might soon be the days when you had to know or find the right humans to help you get unstuck, whether directly or indirectly through inspiration. So much of our creative work, whether writing, drawing, or even programming, is actually about looking for and collecting inspiration from other humans. When we draw or design, we look at reference photos created by others. When we write, we read and reread authors who inspire us and feed our imaginations.

But as mere humans, we cannot read, watch, and listen to all these diverse sources of inspiration fast enough to match the speed of tech. And we have to be selective about the books we read, the TV shows we watch, the concerts we attend, the art shows we visit, the people we spend our time with. Our time and attention are limited and cannot be distributed and scaled over thousands of GPUs, unlike the training of generative AI models.

The makers of AI models don’t have to be as selective about what they train their models on. All that matters is that the data is in a suitable machine-readable format. The more data, the better. Terabytes of data harvested from the internet, ingested over a couple of months, a rate no human could possibly match. It takes humans years just to learn how to speak our native language, and many more years to become proficient in a single field of knowledge so that we can confidently fill blank pages with our thoughts.

Yet, for all our metabolic slowness, we have access to experiences and “data” no machine can begin to understand. To a certain degree, a photo captures the emotions of the person who took it, but it is no replacement for actually being in that place, experiencing the sounds, smells, the presence of other bodies in that space. The soft, squishy stuff, the feelings in our guts and hearts, the goosebumps that we cannot yet represent in machine-readable formats and might never be able to. The stuff that inspires us to fill blank pages with great novels, songs that make us cry, art worthy of hanging on walls in our homes.

You and I will never fill the blank page in the same way, even if we read the same books, watch the same movies. Our bodies will always feel and embody these experiences differently. How differently will generative AI assistants fill our blank pages when we feed them similar content without giving them ways to embody the knowledge? How objective are they really when we’re feeding them content created by biased bodies? And how diverse will the suggestions be when different bodies are not equally represented?

You can prompt an AI assistant to focus on a certain worldview, a certain way of writing about the world, but it doesn’t completely forget everything else it has learned. It doesn’t forget what the statistically most probable way to fill the blank page is. And it cannot draw on what it hasn’t learned, on what it hasn’t gotten the chance to feel, on the thoughts from bodies not included in its training data.

This is something to keep in mind every time you ask an AI assistant to fill in a blank page with suggestions. Be curious about what the AI model has “read”, “watched”, “heard”, “experienced” in the form of human feedback and digital carrots to be capable of suggesting what it did. And what it hasn’t gotten the opportunity to learn due to its design and limitations.

What an AI assistant can do is fill the blank page with the most probable words, in ways it was biased to write or draw the world. And together, you can fill blank pages faster than ever before. Together, you can forget the dread of staring at the blank page. The days of the blank page are now numbered, as a treasure trove of inspiration is now just a sparkling button away. At least for those of us privileged enough to have fairly new computing devices with internet connectivity and ways to power our digital creativity.

As we prepare to put the blank page to rest to pursue the greener pastures of faster creativity, let us pause and wonder. We will save time in our creative pursuits, but at what cost? What will be lost as we forget the discomfort of staring at the blank page? What will be lost as we outsource inspiration to assistants without embodied knowledge?

Will more people be inspired to express themselves on blank pages they previously found too intimidating? Who will be able to afford to speed up their creativity?

And what suggestions are we seeking from these magic AI boxes? Will we fill the blank pages with disposable content? Or discover new ways to fill the blank page with thoughtful perspectives?

There’s power and cost in all magic. The magic AI buttons you press are no exception. As we collectively press the buttons to conquer the blank pages staring at us in our daily lives, let us be curious about the price we are paying for this magic. And the power the sparkly AI buttons wield over determining what ends on our blank pages.

And perhaps remember the magic our slow bodies can still bring into this creative alliance as we conquer more blank pages together.