There's a YouTuber named Fil Henley (https://www.youtube.com/@WingsOfPegasus) who has been covering this for some years, now. Xe regularly comments on how universal application of pitch correction in post as an "industry standard" has dragged the great singers of yore down to the same level of mediocrity as everyone else.

Xe also occasionally reminds people that, equal temperament being what it is, this pitch correction is actually in a few cases making people less well in tune than they originally were.

It certainly removes unique tone. Yesterday's was a pitch corrected version of a performance by John Lennon from 1972, that definitely changed Lennon's sound.

Why are you calling Fil Henley a "xe"? Misgendering a man as non-binary is still misgendering. Let's not normalize misgendering in any way. (And no, you don't get call misgendering a "stylistic choice")

Extremely good analogy and context with the pitch correction thing and equal temperament IMO.

We can only be stoic and say "slop is gonna be slop". People are getting used to AI slop in text ("just proofreading", "not a natural speaker") and they got used to artificial artifacts in commercial/popular music.

It's sad, but it is what it is. As with DSP, there's always a creative way to use the tools (weird prompts, creative uses of failure modes).

In DSP and music production, auto-tune plus vocal comping plus overdubs have normalized music regressing towards an artificial ideal. But inevitably, real samples and individualistic artists achieve distinction by not using the McDonald's-kind of optimization.

Then, at some point, some of this lands in mainstream music, some of it doesn't.

There were always people hearing the difference.

It's a matter of taste.