you could claim that a chess AI lacks understanding of chess. And yet, objectively, it performs better than a human.
The current state of the art AI generated works are probably low quality, but one cannot claim that this won't improve. At some point, i would imagine that the AI generated works would be indistinguishable from human created works, even tho the AI "doesn't actually understand" it.
No you can't, the AI has 100% of the rules of chess, there are no rules the human understands that the AI doesn't understand. Compare that to human written texts, we haven't been able to code all the rules for human written text so the AI doesn't have them. So instead of the AI being able to evaluate what it writes itself, the AI has to try to imitate what humans have written without being able to see if what it wrote is good or not. In chess on the other hand the AI can check itself if it did good moves, since it can play test games and see if the moves leads to victories or not.
If you want to try to code an AI that doesn't understand chess, then write it entirely without encoding any chess rules at all, just train a neural network based on human played games. I'd bet it be hard to even have it do legal moves reliably. That is the level of our current natural language AI.
I never said AI will not get better. Just that its current level of understanding of many of the fields it’s trying to tackle is similar to that of a cargo cult’s.
What about the abstract emotional perception of humans that determines if something resonates with them? You can learn that certain chord patterns have certain emotions associated with them. It's another step of difficulty to make an emotionally coherent that makes people feel something. Most art is about individual expression. Not impossible to fake, but in order to do so well you need to understand the context of the world and the salience of certain things to humans. word2vec won't win any awards for its latest single "king - man is a queen"
Art has never had anything like that