People love to be snobs about pop music, but it's music.
A particular piece of art isn't "soulless" just because it didn't move you. There were still plenty of humans involved in making it, who made specific artistic decisions. In pop music, the creative decisions are often driven by a desire to be as broadly appealing as possible. That's not a good or bad thing unless you judge it as such. It's still art.
The contention that there is something so ethereal, uncapturable, so uniquely and indescribably human that is put into even the blandest piece of mass-market pop that an AI trained on all the music ever made couldn’t create a track that people would accept due to some intangible hollowness, some void where the inestimable quintessence of human existence should be…
That’s hilarious.
I’m not saying it’s not ‘art’ whatever that might mean, I am saying this idea that people won’t accept and enjoy an AI version is a fantasy.
A particular piece of art isn't "soulless" just because it didn't move you. There were still plenty of humans involved in making it, who made specific artistic decisions. In pop music, the creative decisions are often driven by a desire to be as broadly appealing as possible. That's not a good or bad thing unless you judge it as such. It's still art.