I’m not sure why YouTube offered me a video of the Romanian AI singer Lolita Cercel as I left Romania 10 years ago and the YouTube algorithm knows my obsession: the slow-motion car crash of Russia destroying itself in Ukraine.
I like Romanian music — pop, trad and Romani — but it doesn’t grab and intrigue me in the way that Lolita Cercel does.
It feels ridiculous to admit that I fell in love with an artificial pop star, but I do remember being an unhappy teenager falling in love with female film stars and other unobtainable women who had been airbrushed and perfected by make-up artists and photographers. I’ve also read Lolita, the great classic by the Russo-American author Vladimir Nabokov, a 1955 novel of a middle aged man seducing an underage girl and getting away with it (a story that’s repeating itself today with the Epstein scandal). Using this name for an AI pop star should have rung alarm bells, but I was smitten.
When I first heard the music of Lolita Cercel I felt as if I was in the grip of a powerful emotion that I didn’t understand, and my first thought was “I’m in love!” But the more I thought about it the more I realised that it was very different from the feeling I get when attracted to someone in a romantic way. I realised I wasn’t in love with the woman in the videos, but was deeply attracted to the music which, for me, represents all that I love about Romania, the Balkans and the Romani culture (I spent 17 years in Romania). There is a sense of deep longing, of passion, tragedy — but also an excitement, driven by a modern beat. It’s a distillation of cultural heritage from a unique part of the world.
The last time I “fell in love” with a song was in 2023 when I was working in Geneva. The song is called Baila Leila by a Bosnian musician (Goran Bregović) and the Israeli singer Asaf Avadan. It has a strange, joyous, tragic Romani beat, wild Balkan horns, and a powerful message: “Free us from the past!” I still don’t understand how this song captured my heart or why this sometimes happens.
I was on a roll of enthusiasm and naivete and I wondered if Lolita Cercel could be the event that creates tolerance and understanding between the Romanian and Romani people?
I also saw it as a good thing in terms of the technology — isn’t AI just an instrument like synthesisers or drum machines and you still need a person or, as in Lolita’s case, a whole production team behind it — so surely it’s no threat to artists trying to make a living? I was also intrigued with the anonymous creator of Lolita, a guy who calls himself Tom and said AI has “democratised” the creation of music. He claims this new genre will sit alongside, rather than displace, real live music. I also appreciated the fact that Tom didn’t overly-sexualise his creation, as so many music video producers do, and he seemed to have good taste regarding his selection of music, decor and clothing.
My first reaction was that the Lolita phenomenon is a good thing and I disagreed with Romania’s mainstream media which seemed to be saying “This is the end of the human musician!” But haven’t they always been saying this? Wasn’t the Long Playing record, the radio, TV, cassettes, CDs and the internet been doing this for the last 100 years? An example of the media’s outrage is this video by RockFM, under a clickbait title that sounds like a horror story by Edgar Allen Poe: The Terrible Case of Lolita Cercel. Not only does this 16 minute video fail to explain what this “terrible case” actually is, but the guest interviewee, Simion Bogdan Mihai, a hugely talented traditional musician, says that all his future concerts are sold out — showing that live music is still popular in Romania.
I was comfortable in my conviction that this was just the latest technological step in music production, and that both artists and the music industry would adapt — as they always have. There was nothing to worry about and I could enjoy the music in peace.
How my comfortable illusions were shattered
I then shared my enthusiasm with several people whose opinions I respect.
The first person I contacted was Tom Wilson who, I suspected, may be the inspiration for the man behind Lolita Cercel, the anonymous “Tom”.
Tom Wilson has been based in Bucharest for over 20 years and is an inspiring film director as well as a DJ (he uses vinyl LPs). All the cool people I know in Romania either know him, or know of him.
“I’m pretty sure his name has nothing to do with me,” replied Tom Wilson. We were corresponding via the instant message function on Instagram. He then sent me a devastating analysis of AI’s negative impact:
“I think AI is an unmitigated disaster for musicians,” he wrote. ” So many people I know (composers) aren’t working at all because of AI. It’s now so easy to create full songs just using a prompt that anyone can do it. Every producer I know is dead against it. I’m 100% against it for film and video too…It’s completely destroying the industry.
“The whole point about it, for me, is that it’s based on stealing. AI has been trained on your work and my work. When open-source, pro-sharing, peer-to-peer enthusiasts tried to do this in the early 2000s, people went to prison. Now it’s suddenly OK.”
Tom Wilson’s wise words were a slap in the face. I realised my sympathy for the AI phenomena was based on vague personal feelings and raw ignorance. I had a lot to learn about AI’s impact on music. But I have been following global/economic news stories about AI and have seen how Big Tech seems to be becoming ever more brazen in its theft of intellectual property and tax avoidance.
The next person I contacted about this was the Bucharest-based graphic novel creator, Claudiu Revnic, someone whose knowledge of modern culture is encylopaedic. I asked him what he thought about Lolita Cercel and here are some extracts of the fascinating emails he sent me:
“Lolita Cercel is a caricature that circumvents real musicians, real traditions. It is reducing culture to a shiny bag of crisps. She is a plaything out of digital clay. The problem with AI is not that it achieves human creativity, it’s that we become complacent, insipid and robotic.
“There is a massive legal issue here. AI blatantly infringes copyright. While international organisations moved mountains to ensure that countries were abiding to copyright when it came to T-shirts or computers, when it comes to IP [intellectual property] pertaining to the arts, it vanishes into thin air.
“Art is the last bastion of anti-consumerism, but now it is deprived of its mainstream diffusion. Music labels will fuse with streaming platforms to bring you AI music. Analogue media will become an essential way to connect to the past and to get a glimpse of real musical emotion.”
I agreed with what Tom and Claudiu were saying. They changed my mind about AI’s impact on music. The one thing I disagreed with Claudiu is that the music is “crap”. He almost made me feel guilty that I like it. Then I realised it was like my craving for fast food — stuff that tastes good but is bad for you — and it reminded me of a drug addict who once told me that heroin was the best thing he’d ever experienced and it made all his problems go away. This insight helped me put my “love” emotions into context.
I needed to get the Roma perspective on all this so I contacted Magda Matache, whose new book — The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism — I am reading. Magda didn’t make a comment about Lolita Cercel but she did put me in touch with another Roma academic, Maria Dumitru, who is a Doctoral Research Fellow in Oslo.
“Roma women have been marginalised and discriminated against over centuries in Romania,” Maria wrote in an email. “From slavery to the Holocaust, sterilisation, and sexual violence. I also found problematic issues with the name itself, Lolita — exotic and infantile — and then [the word] ‘Cercel’ refers to one of the most known manele musicians in Romania.
“I also see an issue with the lyrics, often inspired, as its creator said, from poems and Romani songs, often using the slur (tiganesti). It is a clear theft of Romani music and heritage, but also a contribution to Romani stigmatization.”
Maria put me in touch with Florentina Manea, president of the Feminist Collective of Romani Gender Experts, who gave me an important quote for this article: “Singers like Laura Vas, Narcisa or Printesa de Aur are never invited to perform authentic Romani music (or manele) on Romanian radio stations”—but it’s fine if an AI avatar does so. This is a subtle form of discrimination against the Roma people and I was, until this moment, unaware of it.
My conclusion about AI is optimistic
It’s clear that the Large Language Models behind AI are based on theft. It’s a form of imperialism where Big Tech is able to bamboozle and cheat whole populations who simply don’t understand what’s going on. I didn’t know what was going on until I researched this article for Contributors.
AI is currently protected by governments as it’s seen as essential to economic development. But it’s a stock market bubble and the business model of ChatGPT is totally insane — AI’s insatiable demand for electricity, water and investment funds is unsustainable.
Also, if you listen to Peter Ziehen, the geostrategist, he’ll tell you that “AI requires the most advanced semiconductor chips that we as a species are capable of making.” Over 100,000 parts are involved, over 3,000 companies, and over 90% of these chips are made in a Taiwanese town (Hsinchu) that may soon be invaded by the Chinese. It’s the most fragile and vulnerable supply chain ever created and could easily be broken (the USA-Iran war is showing us how over-reliant, and vulnerable, we are on global supply chains).
A reckoning is coming — governments are starting to wake up. Trump and Musk hate the EU because it’s standing up to American Big Tech. I asked my AI (Leo) what’s going on legally and it said there is, “a wave of landmark legal challenges in European courts and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) addressing how generative AI interacts with copyright law and data protection.”
One of the first things the EU could do is order all streaming services like Spotify and YouTube to stop paying royalties to music that is produced by AI. That would be a quick win, it would be easy to do technically, it would free up resources for real musicians, and would be an example to the rest of the world that standing up to AI is possible.
We should enjoy free AI while it lasts and I look forward to the day when musicians, artists and writers make a good living by performing in their local communities.
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Rupert Wolfe Murray is a travel writer and his next book, 12 Jobs in 12 Months, will be published soon.
A Romanian version of this article was published in Contributors.ro (March 2026)
In case you were wondering, no part of this article was written by AI — except the short quote at the end where I attributed AI as the source. I think every article should make a declaration like this.