What the History of Autotune Tells Us About the Future of AI

It’s the 50th anniversary of hip hop, and that’s a great opportunity for Bridget to dig into one of her favorite subjects to nerd out about: trends in audio. In this episode, she breaks down the history of auto-tune. Today it’s incredibly common, but when musicians first started using it there was a huge backlash. Prominent musicians said it was ruining music, and Time Magazine put it on their list of “50 Worst Inventions.” Yet artists like T-Pain and Cher used it to create new sounds that listeners loved, and today it is widely accepted as a valuable tool for legitimate artists to use for making music. The disruptive history of auto-tune, originally derided as a toy before innovators embraced it to create something new, offers lessons for how we should understand AI in 2023. 

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