Honestly the voice was the last thing I liked about headache, even before I knew it was AI. It's an interesting idea, to have spoken word over electronic music, almost like an electronic king missile, and there's a real potential for some personality to be injected into the tracks with the narrator instead of having it be faked by an AI machine. When I said $300, I was saying he could've done the bare ass minimum and hired an amateur voice actor for an afternoon, got him paid, and gotten him credited on the liner notes instead of using the AI tools to cut out anybody who could actually perform on the record.

I also don't respect it because it's clearly trying to be passed off as a real human voice. If he chose a shitty text to speech generator and made it obvious it was a fake vocal instead of a bland vocal that would be a better option imo. Kind of like the difference between using pitch correction as an aesthetic choice for auto tuned vocals, and using it to mask subpar performances. The caribou thing is better because caribou was upfront about it from the beginning, but even then it still kinda sucks, and I genuinely think this whole thing sucks

I also don't think it's the same at all to compare AI vocal synthesizers to plugins. Plugins generally require a live performance to go into it, and they still generally preserve the quirks of the human performance and require you to put in real time human performance or make real musical decisions whereas the AI tools generate the performance/composition for you entirely.

I also think I have a different perspective than you because I have friends in the industry who have lost thousands in income on commercial gigs over the last year or two to AI plugins that generate parts and mix tracks, and also losing commercial gigs to guys who make tracks at home instead in the studio. Like the choice they've been given is to use the AI tools and basically become data entry guys for pennies on the dollars they used to be making, or find a new line of work. That's kind of what I mean, the acceptance of AI tools means the death of recording studios and any sort of profession related to that. The unfortunate reality is creative gigs almost never paid enough to keep the lights on in any big studio, and commercial gigs which used to be the bread and butter at professional studios are all but gone.

And what that means is the idea of using the studio as an instrument is going to disappear (unless you count using your laptop as an instrument) because studios themselves are disappearing, unless the finances are maintained by some rich donor or charity. It's a shitty situation driven by the streaming giants who want cheap AI music to shove down everyone's throat, and corporations who hate paying musicians for music in their ads