Millions of Romanians are listening to Lolita Cercel, a singer with a piercing gaze who highlights the plight of those on the margins of society. Her videos have garnered millions of views on social media. But Cercel does not exist in reality.
She was generated entirely by AI. Cercel, which means “earring” in Romanian, is the title of the virtual singer’s first song and became her last name. Every aspect of Lolita Cercel, from her face to her voice, was created by a Romanian graphic designer who wants to remain anonymous and goes only by the name “Tom.”
Tom has described his creation’s style of music as “Balkan trip-hop.” To many listeners, however, it sounds very much like Romanian manele, a genre of pop-folk music with Ottoman influences that can be compared to the turbo-folk of former Yugoslavia. In Romania, manele is often associated with the Roma community, though it has long since entered the mainstream.
Tom, who used to rap at school and later studied film directing without notable success, says he was inspired by a 1941 collection of poems called Cântece țigănești by Miron Radu Paraschivescu. The book’s title, translated as “Gypsy Songs,” is now considered offensive by many in the Roma community. It was published during World War II, when Europe’s Roma suffered brutal persecution; tens of thousands were murdered or deported by the Nazis and their Romanian allies.
Paraschivescu, not a member of the Roma community, wrote sympathetically about Romani people, but he remained an outsider. It was his texts that reignited Tom’s interest in music, enabled by new AI tools. “Lolita was created when my curiosity and the tools at my disposal came to a point that I could create the sound I wanted,” Tom says.
He worked on the character for four months, drawing inspiration from people living in precarious conditions in his hometown in eastern Romania and in the southern European periphery. He says he gathered “unfiltered, grammatically imperfect, vivid words” during evening walks with his dog.
Tom says he made it clear from the start that Lolita Cercel was AI-generated and insists he did not intend to create a Roma character: she is “simply a woman from the Balkans.” For many in the Roma community, that distinction misses the point.
Alex Stan of the Budapest-based Roma Education Fund argues that Lolita Cercel’s name, appearance, musical style and references to practices common in Romani culture combine into a recognizable pattern. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck,” the Roma human rights activist told DW. He calls the project disingenuous because Lolita cannot relate to the “highly complex experiences of a Romani woman,” nor can her creator.
Alexandra Fin, a young Roma activist in Cluj, criticized the project as an “instrumentalization of Roma culture.” She noted the irony that while real Roma artists are often devalued and marginalized, a virtualized, racialized and dehumanized Roma identity has quickly found success. “The difference is racism,” she said.
Tom rejects such criticism, arguing that art need not be based on personal experience. In a video message for DW, Lolita Cercel herself defends the project: “An author doesn’t have to be a murderer to write a compelling crime novel; a deaf composer can create symphonies.” Experience, she says, is “an ingredient, not the whole recipe.”
Critics counter that the lived, performative element of Romani music — the energy and interaction of live performance — cannot be replicated by studio production or an AI avatar. Alex Stan emphasizes that many real Roma artists want recognition and that this project risks creating the impression of a platform for Romani music while excluding Romani people.
He contrasts Tom’s approach with artists who have engaged directly with Romani musicians. Bosnian musician Goran Bregović achieved international success through long-term collaboration with Romani artists, while German producer Stefan Hantel (Shantel) worked with real musicians, including some from Romania, to craft his Balkan sounds. “Tom left this process to an algorithm,” Stan says.
Romanian musician Cristian Ștefănescu, known as Electric Brother, finds Lolita more interesting than much of commercial radio output. Yet he admits that if she were a real singer with the same material, she might have been rejected for being too different — a reflection, he suggests, of the industry’s resistance to anything outside its norms.
Tom is unbowed. He plans to develop Lolita Cercel’s world further, create new characters and explore potential partnerships. For him, AI democratizes creativity. For his critics, it is a tool of exploitation that allows a non-Roma creator to appropriate and monetize the stories and aesthetics of a minority without involving or benefiting members of that community.
Whether poetic or ironic, Lolita Cercel summarizes the contradiction herself: “When you listen to my music and feel something, you’re not thinking of me, but of yourself. I’m just a pretext.”
This article was translated from German.