The Ontological Status of AI-Generated Music: From Stylistic Mimicry to Collaborative Agency

This research deconstructs the ontological status of AIgenerated music, addressing the paradox between its formal aesthetic autonomy and its lack of subjective agency. By integrating Kantian aesthetics, Deweyan pragmatism, and Danto's Artworld theory with a technical analysis of Transformer-based architectures, the study argues that AI music represents a "functionalist triumph" constrained by an "ontological ceiling": while AI achieves highlevel "P-creativity" through statistical optimization, its lack of lived history and embodied cognition renders its output an "aesthetic simulation" rather than a sovereign creation. Moving beyond existing scholarship that identifies human involvement as necessary without specifying its mechanisms, this paper introduces "Ontological Scaffolding"-a framework decomposing human creative agency into four dimensions: Conceptual Space Architecting, Latent Space Navigation, Semantic Anchoring, and Recursive Embodied Refinement. The paper concludes that AI is best understood as a "catalyst of the computational sublime" within a model of Distributed Authorship, while the human "System Orchestrator" remains the final arbiter of meaning in the age of algorithmic perfection.