RE: The Velvet Sundown – What the AI Rock Band Hoax Is Telling Us About the Future of Music

Awesome train of thought, ending with the most thought-provoking item: Do real human artists like Taylor Swift actually exist? Sure, they are built around a flesh&blood human who know how to sing and move around on the stage. Or do they? Sound engineers have been great at hiding flaws and bringing out the most spectacular features of real voices, the same way light technicians and photographers have learned to set someone in the most favorable light. And that's not even including the PR crowd, who knows how to spin someone's life story to make them look like the embodiment of the American Dream, or whatever image they are going for.

So much about trust and authenticity. But do the fans really care about all this? Clearly not all that much, since this has been going on since the conception of show business, so no fan should be fooled unless they surrender to it. Which is exactly the point: the illusion of the stage. And at that point it's only secondary if the musicians, actors (or even set designers and make-up artists) are real people, or partially / entirely machine generated.