I think this sentiment is actually incredibly sad and more or less the crux of the matter. AI is a tool intended on increasing efficiency. The way you describe

I think this sentiment is actually incredibly sad and more or less the crux of the matter. AI is a tool intended on increasing efficiency. The way you describe the act of making art/crafting things seems to come through the lens of efficiency, where you're wasting your time in the struggle of improvement. The time spent struggling is not time wasted. The struggle is the single most important aspect of learning and improving. Its how lessons learned reach the deep subconscious as if you're walking or writing with a pen. No good musician, painter, sculptor, systems engineer, etc became that way without that deep struggle. If someone says they never struggled, be wary of them. If we round off every corner in the name of efficiency and the bottom line, all we're left with is toil. We don't benefit from that toil, the people who push for greater and greater efficiency do. No matter how efficient we get, the excesses produced by the efficiencies will be guarded. Food thrown away, excess milk dumped in the dirt, crops burned, profits stowed away. The AI can only exist via previous struggle. The music produced by AI will only ever be a shadow of Human struggle. It will never truly exceed that struggle. A series of vectors in memory on a graphics card can't know the feeling of a beat as it resounds in ones chest, or the resolution of a chord as the bridge turns around. It can't know the sympathetic emotions of a story told in lyrics. It can't know the nostalgia evoked by a shadow in a painting, or the familiarity of an expression in a face. Only we as humans can create this, and its sad and disgusting to see these tools used to degrade the human experience for an ounce of profit by people who refuse to allow themselves to understand the struggle of creating art.