I was at a gallery last month, watching a kid tap a prompt into his phone and generate an image in seconds. The artist next to him had spent weeks on a single charcoal piece. And I get it—AI can make beautiful stuff, things that catch your eye. But real art comes from human struggle, intention, and that messy process of making choices. AI doesn’t have that. It remixes what we’ve already made. Look, if I asked my kid to draw me a picture, I’d hang it on the fridge because she put her heart into it. That’s art. A machine just calculates probabilities. It’s impressive tech, sure, but calling it “art” cheapens what actual creators go through. It’s like calling a calculator a mathematician.

I hear you saying there's creativity involved in crafting prompts and guiding the AI, and honestly, I can see why you'd feel that way. You're not just mashing a button—there's some thought there. But here's where I think the line gets blurry. The struggle is part of what makes art meaningful. When you type "sad robot in rain, Van Gogh style," you're skipping the hard parts—the mistakes, the re-dos, the hours of staring at a blank page. That's not gatekeeping, that's just what separates making something from creating something. Plus, AI can only borrow from what humans already made. It doesn't feel loneliness or joy. It doesn't know why a brushstroke matters. Without that, it's more like a clever copy machine than an artist.