At that point, is it AI generated?? That feels like an entirely different category to me

(like it's sort of no difference than paying someone to voice something and share it)

I think the stuff that is completely generated with no human in the loop is a different category for me because it can be used for things at scale like, bots on social media, or ads in a podcast generated just for you, etc. As long as there is still a human in the loop making the editing decisions, it feels not categorically different from the world we have today.

That's a fair point, but "ai does the work and humans clean up the mistakes" is generally a lot faster than humans doing all the work. Singing well takes skill (even when you have autotune), splicing together multiple "takes" into one good recording, less so.

I'm never going to have the voice to sing this, but I can easily imagine learning how to edit it.

AI/Human combos can still be valuable. More broadly I'd argue that that's how almost all tech works. E.g. there are still textile workers, just many less of them producing much more clothing.

I would say it's still categorically different, just because we're automating one piece of labor that was kind of thought until about ~12 years ago to be un-automatible.

Like, there's been computer-singing voices for awhile, but they always sounded pretty robotic and goofy (e.g. Microsoft Sam), and I think for a long time people just assumed that to get mostly-realistic voices, you need an actual singer. Yes, it still requires a bit of human tweaking to make it perfect, but I suspect that if put to the test it would reduce the cost of making a song substantially.