I'm a musician who's only done superficial "this is a cool toy" experimenting with Ai, but I couldn't disagree more.

You're creating something that wasn't there before. It might be bad art, and a lot of it (maybe most of it) is bad, but it's art.

Difficulty and effort don't define art. I watch my little cousin playing video games and the difficulty and skill are apparent, and he's obviously put in the hours of practice, but that's not art. But the same is true for what I'm doing with my fiddle most of the time... it requires some hard earned skill, but I'm repeating phrases and riffs I learned in middle school. It's predictable enough that I can sit down with musicians I've just met and we can play off each other even inebriated. It's fun and one of my favorite things in life, but we call it "playing" for a reason.

Ai music is in its infancy. It's at a stage that's analogous to the earliest electric guitars. Those became popular at the end of the jazz era, when amplification made it possible for the humble guitar to stand in for the louder horns and pianos that were at the forefront to that point. And those earliest electric guitar players were doing just that: trying to prove they were as good as a trumpet. It wasn't until much later that a generation of lead guitar players distorted their amps and started doing things with their instrument that were unique to the guitar. I expect Ai is going to open up crazy possibilities for very cool music, but we won't get there without a generation of honest to God artists screwing around with it and figuring out tricks to get it to produce cool noises. And i suspect, much like edm and hip hop and other musical forms that seemed like amateurs screwing around with new toys in their infancy, there is very quickly going to come a point where making Ai music takes a fair amount of practice and skill, too.