I also believe the Milli Vanilli argument to be flawed, but the other way around: music videos were all the rage back then and the two supposed singers were actually just performers for the cameras. Does this mean they had no part in the success of the music? I don't believe that.
That's not to say they were right in misleading the public and their fans, but it seems to me that Milli Vanilli was a fruitful combination of the public-facing performers and the musical process behind them. Everyone is fine with ghostwriters, why is this so different? The entertainment industry is fake through and through, but nobody is actually taking offense from this fact.
I often wondered if a similar project could find success if it were presented differently, as a cooperation of musicians and performers
actually, i am not fine with ghostwriters. i am fine with speechwriters, because public speeches are a shared product, so is music. performing someone else's music is normal and probably has been done ever since music existed. in that sense i would also not mind a performance of a song if that song was originally created using AI. if the song and the performance are good that it is no different from performing a traditional song. if you don't like AI music, that's fine, i also don't like every traditional song, but that's not the fault of the performer (beyond choosing a song you don't like). the problem with milli vanilli is that they violated the expectation that we know who the singers are. milli vanilli were dancers, not singers, and if that had been properly communicated, it would have been fine.
