[memothon]

I think your post is taking these AI voices out of their original context.

First let's consider CD -> streaming as a media change. Streaming didn't really exist when Tupac was around. But nobody would say putting Tupac's catalog on streaming is inherently disrespectful to his artistic legacy because it's preserving (more or less) the same artistic product.

Here are a couple other examples that I do think are more analogous than improvements in recording technologies:

Posthumous releases with material not created by the artist. Sometimes record labels will try to capitalize on the brand of an artist and release material that really only has snippets of random recordings that an artist made. In my view, this is disrespectful to the artist because it's not a piece of artistic material they wanted to release.

Another example is colorizing black and white movies. Similarly, this action changes the actual artistic product in a way that's disrespectful to the creators of those films.

Creating AI voices of artists is similar to these examples because it's changing the artistic output of an artist and disrespecting their artistic legacy. It's creating content under their name without the ability for them to say no or have any input into the output.