I noticed that it is possible to generate a wallet which is encrypted with BIP0038 without giving a password. How does this work?

Does the algorithm have a default password it uses to generate the new key? or is a random password generated?

If an address is created in this manner, i.e password-less, you cannot access it from bitaddress.org as an error is given that reads "Passphrase required for BIP38 key" so a password must be assigned to it somehow.

I wouldn't know where to start to look at the code to find this out for myself.