Artists are everywhere. They’re buy one, get one free at the nearest convenience store, or maybe even half-off if you look online, because we’re all so desperate to get them off our hands. What’s-her-face who lives two doors down insists her kid won’t be an artist, not her little girl – She’ll get a real, practical job, like being a doctor. Anything to kill the time until she kills herself, because that’s when her little doodles will actually have value to them.

Artists are everywhere, and they are starving. Not starving themselves. They are being starved. They are staring their pain in the face and forcing it to make sense to them, splaying their findings on canvas, paper, etc. They’re admiring what others turn up their noses at and paying it proper respect. But the robots are so cool the way they spit out soulless amalgamations of other people’s work! How could we ever want anything more?

Imagine you are a baker. You’ve spent years learning the perfect cake-making technique, just like Grandma taught you. You make a cake so beautiful that Grandma cries looking at it from heaven, a cake that tastes so delicious that you just about pass out on the spot. You box it up carefully and take it to the bake-off. Just some friendly competition, and a chance to show off your hard-earned skills.

Now imagine that some random guy – we’ll call him John – waltzes into the bake-off with an empty tray. John takes a slice of every single cake, including yours, which makes you want to strangle the guy. He puts the slices on his tray and presents it to the judges, praising how quickly he made it. A cake of every flavor, and he didn’t even need to turn on his oven!

We all know John didn’t make the cake. We know John has stolen the cake and made an enemy of your sweet Grandma, who is about to smite him. And we know John is a douchebag, not a baker. He’d be kicked out of the competition right away. So why is it any different with art?

Society loses its soul when it stops making art. When we start praising AI and its “art,” we bid farewell to the one thing that united us in the first place. AI doesn’t make art more accessible – it doesn’t even make art to begin with. There is nothing in this world as accessible as art. Do you think cavemen needed expensive tablets and fancy markers? No. And neither do you.

At the end of the day, the choice is yours: You can steal a bunch of cake and then get banned from all the local bakeries, living the rest of your life depressed that you can’t get a sweet treat, or you can buy cake from an actual baker like a normal human being. Maybe you can even pick up a whisk and learn to cook already.