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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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