Been thinkin’ about…The power of a blank page

A blank page is the best thing for the soul. A blank page is a world without prescribed templates, a world full of indecision, a world exploding with impossible possibilities.

Late spring was once the season when each new generation of America’s children was faced with their own blank pages — often in the form of lazy days waiting to be exploited by the imagination, a world ahead unscripted. Truth is, it is within those moments we begin to develop our own inner voices, our own agency, our own real sense of being.

Starting from scratch is scary in a world that says there’s already a template, already a plan, already a process, if we but just input the right key words or seek out the right authority. I believe it’s the reason we are drawn to avant-garde art, drawn to the edges, the thresholds, the scary places of the mind and in life (especially in adolescence). Thrill-seeking makes sense in this milieu. Danger becomes an antidote to too much control, too much authority, and too little human soul and personal agency.

Every day this past week, it seems, I’ve been bombarded by some opinion of “artificial intelligence.” I still contend that the really scary AI is literally artificial intelligence (in that real-live people pretending to be intelligent is frightening). But AI is the new trend, the new buzzword, the new opinion piece. It would be far less sexy if we called AI for what it actually is — a “search engine aggregator with a visual output option.” Our search engines already churn out all available data on a given topic, crawling the web for answers. AI is doing the same, but outputting the results in a more “human” report. Definitely less sexy than SkyNet.

But all that web-crawling and outputting means your AI is searching available images (like the original photographs I put on the web) to create your suddenly requisite event poster. Legal rules say an image only need be changed by three points to no longer be owned, but it still feels like stealing. A consumer-driven society says that doesn’t matter. And who really owns anything anyway? The World Economic Forum already said we would own nothing and be happy about it. But for human beings showing something wild and crazy like personal agency or a desire for property rights, all this AI grabbing is stealing, whether it’s legal or not.

“For any event, you can just type into the chat and AI will give you step-by-step instructions on how to do it. You get great ideas and you don’t have to think about it.”

You. Don’t. Have. To. Think. About. It.

For a consumer-driven society, it doesn’t matter that you show your work, only that you get the answer, even if you get the answer from somebody else. Beyond the basic idea that we have principles against cheating, there is something inexpressibly lost in shortcutting the journey. I think back to the very first festival I designed. I had a very specific vision for StateoftheOzarks Fest and worked around the clock to see that vision brought to life. In a world increasingly soulless — even without AI —I wanted my festival to have soul, to have personality, to give experiences that challenged and delighted in surprising ways. 

“Which festival is yours?”

“The one with Medieval combat.”

“Oh…”

ChatGPT would decidedly not have included Medieval combat in an “Ozarks Crafts Festival.” Still, it’s not really AI’s fault. We created and fed the system, after all. Our society’s groupthink has been obsessed about end results for decades — consumer-available products, test scores, profit bottomline and a million cookie-cutter houses all painted in “2007 Interior Beige.” Say what you will about architecture of the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, but the designs were not without personality. And in deeply profound ways, surrounding ourselves with unique beauty informs the soul, reminding us that we also are inexpressibly, beautifully unique. What does living inside plain beige cubes say about us today?

But never mind the lack of Second Empire mansard roofs or Queen Anne filigree, the ability to take a blank page, a clean slate, a new thought, and think and reason the thing through until it becomes a real, living thing? That process is difficult, a journey that must be undertook, and a journey with risk. Beige cubicles of the mind don’t have space for risk or reward, only result. Only another bland “end product” to be stocked on the shelf.

More and more books are appearing having been written by AI, although with a human “author” providing the prompts. It’s easy enough to celebrate, of course. Another product has been added to the economy and we are a consumer- (not a creator-) obsessed society. But something unseen and profound is lost in the process. The critical skill of writing is not placing words on a page, but in assembling thoughts and emotions in human ways. We learn to organize our logic, even in fantasy, as we are forced to slow down long enough to feel the words and ideas, ultimately challenging ourselves to see if our ideas are “think-ish” as A. A. Milne wrote once. If our ideas are not “think-ish” then we have to go back to the drawing board. A digital tool cannot tell the difference.

Go back to a truly original artist or author and listen to one of their interviews, say, perhaps, a Ray Bradbury or Anne Rice. Listen to them talk, listen to how they talk, and you will realize they became exceptional thinkers who trained their minds through experience, hardship, loss, even death, to create something that speaks inexpressibly to our souls in transcendent ways.

Twenty years and a short two weeks ago, I found myself sitting in front of my new studio computer, transcribing an interview about the fiddle in Missouri. Outside, it was a beautiful spring afternoon. The cursor was blinking on the white page, waiting for me to type the words “State of the Ozarks” for the first time.

And again, the spring sky is now — 20 years later — filled with visions and promise. As a new season and a new chapter begins, it feels almost as though I’m young again. A whole world of impossible impossibilities lies just ahead, lies just waiting to be written. Human freedom. Human agency. Human soul. The inexpressible things that make a legacy, that leave a memory, that make a life worth living. That is the power of a blank page.