The blank canvas is dead

Monthly thoughts from the FLORA team on where creativity is headed. In Provocations 001, we share a manifesto of sorts on the state of creative tooling.

The New Medium

Creativity will never be the same again. We are at the precipice of a revolution.

AI studies patterns in the past to imagine what might come next. For the first time, creation is not bound by material constraint. This can be an utterly scary thought… until we realize that it is entirely in our hands to steer this. We’re faced with a new medium, one that doesn’t just shape how we create, but what creation is. Every major shift in creative history began with a new tool: the brush extended the hand, the camera extended the eye, the computer extended the mind. AI is different: it extends imagination itself.

From Scarcity to Surplus

While traditional mediums pushed against the physical limits of canvas, pigment, and celluloid, the medium of artificial intelligence pushes against informational limits. We are no longer sculpting marble or painting light, we are curating meaning. 

Creation no longer begins in absence, but in surplus. The blank page has been replaced by an infinite swarm of possibilities, and the artist’s role is to decide what deserves to surface. The standard of creativity, then, comes from not the ability to rearrange patterns, but to discover the exception between them.

If Picasso were alive today, he wouldn’t mourn the algorithm — he would collaborate with it. Duchamp’s urinal shattered conventions not through what was shown, but what was not shown. It forced art to confront its own definition. AI now does the same. But as history has shown, every new medium at first appears profane before it sublimates to the sacred.

Enrichment, Not Replacement

Many fear AI because they confuse it with replacement, which is the idea that machines will not only assist us, but erase us. That fear is understandable, but the sheer surplus of information means that while bad work is incredibly easy, great work is more within our reach than ever. 

We think the real distinction lies between replacement and enrichment. Replacement is mechanical, replicating what exists. Enrichment is creative, revealing what could not exist without us. 

When we treat AI as a tool for infinite expression rather than a rival intelligence, we restore creative agency to the individual. The artist becomes not a passive consumer of automation, but an active conductor of it. Our tools themselves are inert. Great ideas require intent, taste, and imagination to come alive. AI cannot exist meaningfully without the creator; it is the creator who decides what deserves to surface from the swarm.

Democratizing Creation

Today, creative power remains concentrated in too few hands: studios, agencies, institutions that decide what gets made and who gets seen. 

Generative tools collapse the distance between imagination and output. They let a single individual operate with the power of a studio. Creation is no longer limited by capital or access, only by curiosity and intent. Our new tools can expand who gets to make culture, not just consume it. 

The Intelligent Canvas

Culture once moved slowly enough to inhabit. Subcultures lasted and identities could take root. Now, hyper-optimization has fractured culture into infinite micro-moments. Trends rise and vanish overnight, and the creator is pressured to stay visible within constant reinvention. Every creative revolution has reshaped who gets to make: the printing press birthed publishers, the camera filmmakers, the computer designers. The intelligent canvas will do the same. 

A good tool disappears into intention; it becomes invisible in service of the idea. Tech for tech’s sake is a fool's errand, and every creative tool must be in service of the vision of the artist. The best generative systems will not replace the artist; they will expand the terrain of what an artist can be.

FLORA is built for this next creative class: those who create at the speed of thought and remain unmistakably human while doing it.