This is exactly what’s at stake. I heard an artist say one time that he’d rather listen to Bob Dylan miss a note than listen to a song that had all the imperfections engineered out of it.

The flipside of that is the most popular artists of all time (eg Taylor Swift) do autotune to perfection, and yet more and more people love them

If you ask a Swiftie what they love about Taylor Swift, I guarantee they will not say "the autotune is flawless".

They're not connecting with the relative correctness of each note, but feeling a human, creative connection with an artist expressing herself.

They're "creatively connecting" to an autotuned version of a human, not to a "flawed Bob Dylan"

They're not connecting to the autotune, but to the artist. People have a lot of opinions about Taylor Swift's music but "not being personal enough" is definitely not a common one.

If you wanna advocate for unplugged music being more gratifying, I don't disagree, but acting like the autotune is what people are getting out of Taylor Swift songs is goofy.

I have no idea about Taylor Swift so I'll ask in general: can't we have a human showing an autotuned personality? Like, you are what you are in private, but in interviews you focus on things suggested by your AI conselor, your lyrics are fine tuned by AI, all this to show a better marketable personality? Maybe that's the autotune we should worry about. Again, nothing new (looking at you, Village People) but nowadays the potential powered by AI is many orders of magnitude higher... you could say yes only until the fans catch wind of it, true, but by that time the next figure shows up and so on. Not sure where this arms escalation can lead us. Because also acceptance levels are shifting, so what we reject today as unacceptable lies could be fine tomorrow, look already at the AI influencers doing a decent job while overtly fake.

I’m convinced it’s already being done, or at least played with. Lots of public figures only speak through a teleprompter. It would be easy to put a fine tuned LLM on the other side of that teleprompter where even unscripted questions can be met with scripted answers.

you're missing the point by a few miles

> yet more and more people love them

I think that says more about media-technology, corporate ecosystems, and overall population-growth than about music itself.

I think the key thing here is equating trust and truth. I trust my dog, a lot, more than most humans frankly. She has some of my highest levels of trust attainable, yet I don’t exactly equate her actions with truth. She often barks when there’s no one at the door or at false threats she doesn’t know aren’t real threats and so on. But I trust she believes it 100% and thinks she’s helping me 100%.

What I think OP was saying and I agree with is that connection, that knowing no matter what was said or how flawed or what motive someone had I trusted there was a human producing the words. I could guess and reasons the other factors away. Now I don’t always know if that is the case.

If you’ve ever played a multiplayer game, most of the enjoyable experience for me is playing other humans. We’ve had good game AIs in many domains for years, sometimes difficult to distinguish from humans, but I always lost interest if I didn’t know I was in fact playing and connecting with another human. If it’s just some automated system I could do that any hour of the day as much as I want but it lacked the human connection element, the flaws, the emotion, the connection. If you can reproduce that then maybe it would be enjoyable but that sort of substance has meaning to many.

It’s interesting to see a calculator quickly spit out correct complex arithmetic but when you see a human do it, it’s more impressive or at least interesting, because you know the natural capability is lower and that they’re flawed just like you are.

> She has some of my highest levels of trust attainable

I like to think of these ambiguities of "trust" as something like:

1. Trusting their identity

2. Trusting their intentions

3. Trusting their judgement about what to do

4. Trusting their competence to execute the task