AI means there's no more "blank page." So, what does that mean for our creativity?

Hear me out: sometimes I just loooove a good doomscroll.

And before you judge me: I’m not perfect and I’ve never claimed to be. I am just a monkey with all the information and entertainment that ever existed in the entire world contained in the tiny device wielded in my hand, after all. 

Anyway, who are you, Judy?

There are times when a numbing, hypnotic descent through an endless feed is not only pleasurable, but necessary. Because, you know… the horrors.

It’s sometimes also completely unavoidable – by design, of course. The very act itself thrives on infinite supply. There’s always one more post, one more hot take, one more breaking headline.

But lately, another quieter thief has slipped into our attention economy.

It doesn’t live in a feed, but in a box. A blinking cursor. A polite little interface that asks nothing more than: What would you like me to do?

This thief is so quiet, it even slipped past me: chronically online, constantly researching consumer trends, online behaviour, our relationship with digital culture. That was until I saw Anu, of Working Theorys write about a new phenomenon:

Welcome to the stage, Doomprompting.

At first glance, it feels empowering. Here’s an LLM that can help you think, draft, brainstorm, polish. However, there is a major problem here: it never fkn runs out.

Its polite offers (“Would you like me to expand?” “Shall I go on?” “Have you considered…?”) keep the dialogue alive long past the point you would have stopped, reflected, or wrestled with the silence on your own.

And unlike doomscrolling, where the loop is fuelled by outside noise, doomprompting is recursive. You’re not only consuming what’s offered. You’re training yourself to consume suggestion itself.

Traditionally, the blank page has been both enemy and friend.

It’s a void that intimidates, but also a crucible that forces you to wrestle with raw thought. Blankness demands something of you. Out of that friction, insight often emerges.

With LLMs, the box is never truly blank. The cursor is only a breath away from a cascade of generated text. And so the hardest part—the stillness, the confrontation with your own uncertainty—simply slips away.

The result is subtle. You don’t stop creating altogether. You just start creating half-attentively. Your role shifts from thinker to negotiator. You let the model generate, and you edit. You let it suggest, and you approve. You let it carry, and you react.

You’re still “working,” but the depth is gone - lights are on but no one’s home type beat.

That’s what I like to call sharpening the tool, dulling the hand. Every time we lean on suggestion, the tool sharpens. It gets better at anticipating what we want, faster at offering the next thread, more fluent in the rhythms of our voice. But paradoxically, every time the tool sharpens, we dull a little.

It’s like outsourcing memory to Google Maps. You don’t forget how to drive, but you do kind of forget how to navigate. Outsourcing first-draft thinking to AI risks the same fate. You don’t lose the ability to write. But you lose the muscles of attention, reflection, and insight that make writing, you know, matter.

Before you are two paths:

On one path, AI becomes the slot machine of the attention economy. It offers up the fast food of thought. Cheap, sh*tty, but engineered to keep you consuming, all wrapped up and disguised as bite-sized bursts of validation. It’s not inherently harmful in small doses, but try building a diet on it and you’ll find yourself malnourished.

On the other path, AI evolves into a sparring partner. Not a slot machine, but a gym. It’s where friction lives. Where silence isn’t erased but respected. Where the point isn’t to have the machine fill the page for you, but to have it challenge, redirect, or stretch you.

That second path is harder, because it requires design that resists the easy loop of suggestion. It demands constraints, intentional breaks, and the courage to sit in the awkward stillness before pressing continue.

Because ultimately, creative work is not about efficiency.

It’s about communion. Before the world, before the audience, even before the tool, it begins with communion with oneself. And that communion doesn’t survive if we outsource every pause, every silence, every hard-earned thought to the next machine-generated continuation.

So here’s the choice we face: collaboration or automation. Slot machine or sparring partner. Nourishment or candy.

If doomprompting is the thief, then stillness is the lock. And craft is the key.

Good luck, soldier. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer