M.002 The Blank Page and AI

You are reading Molekyl, finally unfinished thinking on strategy, creativity and technology. Subscribe here to get new posts in your inbox.

---

The first words are always the most difficult.

But the second ones are not easy either.

Regardless, words must find their way down to the paper. Because you can't progress from a standstill, and you can't finish unless you start.

But how?

Today the answer is more often than not one word: AI.

Just ask AI to write something for you. Something to get you started. Something that fixes the curse of the blank page with the blink of an eye. AI seems like a miraculous solution to the problem of the blank page, descending from the technology-gods on struggling writers everywhere. But is it really ?

I think not. And there are three reasons for this.

AI doesn’t really solve the problem

The first is that the real problem of the blank page - that you struggle with your first words - remains unsolved with AI. Using an AI to generate text just pulls a curtain of someone else's words on top of your blank page.

If you think about it, using AI to create your first words is not that different from copying text from Wikipedia and pasting it on your blank page, and work from there. Or copy excerpts from a book. In either case, it's someone else’s words. Not yours.

You might disagree since the words of the AI after all are created based on your direction. But picking Wikipedia or book excerpts to copy and work from also involves your direction, selection, and agency. It's someone else's words, and your page remains blank behind this curtain.

See your thinking

The second reason is that writing and thinking are highly related and often inseparable activities. Hence the phrase "think on paper." Or as E.M. Forster famously put it, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"

Writing allows you to see your thinking. It provides clarity, forces you to structure and formulate abstract bits and pieces of knowledge into coherent ideas. It showcases breaches in logic. And it sharpens your own reflections.

Letting the AI formulate the first words rob you the opportunity to see what you think, and to sharpen this thinking. Instead you see what someone else thinks, or what someone else think you think. And before you know it, you have fallen for the illusion that what you see is your own thinking.

Control the direction

A third reason is that having AI fill the blank page essentially means that you let someone else dictate the direction of your thinking.

The blank page is a representation of the endless possibility space that is the human mind. Before the first word is entered, the page could potentially be filled with any combination of the vast number of ideas, knowledge, reflections, and experiences you have in your head.

When the first words enter the paper, the opportunity space starts to narrow as each word imposing implicit constraints on what can come next. Just like a large language model predicts the next word based on the word(s) already there, every word you put down on paper narrows the corridor of what comes next.

Jonathan Ive highlighted this power of language in an interview with WSJ. “If [I say] I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said chair, you’ve just said no to a thousand ideas.”

When you use AI to fill your blank page, it's not you who are doing this narrowing. It's the AI. You let someone else say no to thousands of your ideas on your behalf, and you allow someone else to dictate the possible directions of your writing and thinking.

When you instead write the first words yourself, you are providing the direction. A direction that is guided by your unique combination of ideas, experiences, and competencies to create something personal and unique. It may not be good at first, but it is you and your thinking.

A challenge worth tackling

Overcoming the blank page is a challenge. But real progress and growth usually result from overcoming something challenging.

The first words created by the AI will be better than your own words, but they wont be yours. For text you care about, the 'you' is often more important than the what. And especially so the more AI-generate content that is being produced.

With AI available at our fingertips, it takes discipline to resist the temptation to turn to AI when faced with the blank page. The ease and availability of LLMs makes it easy to take cognitive shortcuts, something us humans are wired to make.

Therefore, we should see the challenge of the blank page as something we need to overcome to retain ourselves in an increasingly synthetic world.

So next time the blank page stares back—wait a moment.

Let it be blank.

Then see what comes from you, not for you.