alt Hacker NewsI confess I am torn by your comment. I myself wouldn't choose AI for guitar, given that's where I have perfected my craft, and I am able to relate to what you said. However, not as an artist, but as a listener, I have no trouble with a guitar composition made by a machine.
John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's inner struggle but about the work's capacity to generate lasting experiences. This also ties well into Roland Barthes' essay about reading and how language is a living thing. He puts forward the notion that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer. Audiences is what turns it into an experience.
Again, this isn't to devalue the effort or that the inner struggle isn't commendable, this is to say that artistic value can exist beyond that.
The making of art is a personal experience, and the beholding of art is another type of personal experience. If we suggest that the two can be separated such that we can behold art without knowledge of the production of it, well I would consider that wrong. There is a reason each piece in a museum is given a plaque telling its medium and brief background. This is because the meaning of a piece is derived from its context and cannot be separated from it without making art an arbitrary sensory stimuli.
The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.
If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.
Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?
As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.