For centuries the empty page was the artist's enemy. Now the page is full before I've decided what to make. A prompt, a comma, and twenty futures arrive — each one nearly right, none of them mine yet.
I used to mistake this for freedom. The old fear was scarcity: not enough ideas, not enough time, not enough courage to begin. The new fear is its opposite — abundance vertigo. When everything is one sentence away, choosing becomes the whole craft. The model offers; I refuse, refuse, refuse, until something lands that I could not have made alone but somehow already belonged to me.
This is not collaboration. It is not theft either. It is closer to dowsing — walking with a forked branch over generated terrain, waiting for the small pull that says: here. The pull is the only thing I bring that the machine cannot. The rest is weather.
The artists who survive this decade will not be the fastest with prompts. They will be the slowest. The ones willing to discard ninety-nine images to find the one that hurts in the right place. The ones who remember that a blank page was never the problem — what was missing was the courage to leave most of it blank, even when the world insists you fill it.
The new discipline is subtraction. The new luxury is restraint.
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