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Have you ever felt pain? If yes, then you know what it means to have a conscious experience. It's that, and the other things like that (sensations more generally, the way things look, the way things sound, and the like).
Animals can presumably feel pain, but cannot create art (as we understand it, at any rate). AIs presumably cannot feel pain, but can create art. I don't understand the connection between consciousness and ability to create art.
That's a good point.
I did specify though that there was more to it than just consciousness:
So the bare fact of consciousness alone is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for me to find value in a work.
But again, this just seems like a bit of a cheat. Supposing I presented you with the most movingly crafted novel ever composed, with vividly drawn characters, a delicately paced plot and subtle but resonant symbolism. You read it, it moves you to tears, you're thinking about it for weeks afterwards. Then I tell you that I just gave ChatGPT-5 (which has no upper character limit) the prompt "write me a literary novel which could win the Booker prize". How do you explain your relationship to this hypothetical novel? All the emotions it made you feel, all the thoughts it provoked - they weren't real, because the words were arranged on the page by an entity who wasn't conscious? Nothing about the arrangement of the words on the page has changed - you've only learned something new about the creator. (Asserting "Chat-GPT could never do that" is refusing to engage with the terms of my hypothetical, not an actual response.)
I think everyone who has read a novel or watched a movie is familiar with the experience of information you learn later coloring your perception of what came before. Like, you're watching a movie, and in the beginning there are a lot of tantalizing clues about how the story might develop, and you're interested to see where it goes; but then the big twist at the end sucks, it doesn't stick the landing. So you end up concluding that the movie as a whole was bad and not worth the time. "Yeah, it was cool in the beginning, but it didn't go anywhere". Your knowledge of what the complete work looks like invalidates the excitement you felt in the beginning.
Or, to take a more extreme example: suppose you have a neighbor who you have had nothing but pleasant and friendly interactions with for years, and then one day you learn that he's actually been a serial killer this whole time, committing murders unbeknownst to you. You would immediately change your judgement of him and start thinking that he's a terrible person, regardless of how outwardly friendly he had been to you up until that point. Certainly, your previous pleasant interactions with him were real and are still real; the past isn't literally rewritten. It's just that the prior information you had about him is no longer relevant in your overall evaluation of his moral status, due to the overwhelming significance of the new information you've acquired.
Hopefully these analogies illustrate how it is conceivable that learning that a work was actually created by AI could shift your overall evaluation of it, even if you previously had a very positive evaluation based on your direct experience of the work. I agree with @DTulpa's assessment here: if I learned that my favorite album was actually AI, I wouldn't be able to look at it the same way again.
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