BTW - I'm curious, what do you think about birds songs? Are their songs interesting artistically? How do you think they were composed?
On the other hand, you have composers like John Cage (or more recently: Peter Ablinger) who claim that the act of listening itself can be/create art, blurring the borders between nature and art. There are conceptual pieces which only consist of listening instructions.
Finally, bird "songs" have been used as the source material for musical composition for centuries. You can find it in Beethoven, Mahler, Debussy, Stravinsky, etc. Olivier Messiaen even was a hobby ornithologist; he faithfully transcribed hundreds of bird songs and used them in his music (see for example his piano cycle "Catalogue d’oiseaux").
As for the question of who composed the actual bird songs, the answer probably depends on the theological background of the person you ask ;-)
I think this topic will keep reverting to the point you raise - "meaningful art". As long as the "meaning" is a construct in a human brain that we're looking for, we have little to say about AI and it's capabilities (like Joshua Bell's hardly-noticed playing of Bach classics at New York's subway station as opposed to when he's performing at a concert hall).
.. (edit) and I do think that active listening is itself a creative act.
However, we have to make a clear distinction between creative and recreative methods. David Cope's work is impressive, but it focusses on the recreation of existing musical styles. This is interesting from a musicologist perspective, but not very interesting artistically.
I would certainly say that deep learning generates lots of interesting “material“ (like many other methods of algorithmic composition), but we still need a human being to curate, edit and assemble the material into a meaningful piece of art.
Finally, I think the current AI debate can be very fruitful for the arts. In a way, it raises similar questions as the concept of the “readymade“ and the pop art movement did in the 20th century.
Btw, I'm currently working on an opera which uses AI generated lyrics :-)