The clue was there from the beginning: the supposed three members of the pop group Las Nenas were called Viviana, Claudia and Naiara, all three with the acronym IA very clear in their names. The group was getting some impact with its first album, ‘Último bathroom’, but it was discovered that the music was entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Beyond the merely formal consequences, that is, the withdrawal of their songs from Spotify, the uniqueness of the phenomenon means that we have to once again put on the table the issue of the limits of creativity and its scope.

Three humans that do not exist. The group gained some popularity after appearing interviewed on elDiario.es. The peculiarity of its sound and the enigma surrounding its members unleashed immediate suspicions and rumors about its legitimate existence, which led the group to partially remove its masks. According to those responsible for it, who continue to remain anonymous, the lyrics of its songs are composed by humans, while all the music and voices are performed through AI. “Since the questionnaire did not talk about how we made the musical part of our songs, we did not feel that we had to warn about the non-human part of our artistic project,” they excused themselves digitally, in an article that the newspaper published explaining the deception.

Off Spotify. The disappearance of Las Nenas from Spotify has come by decision of their digital distributor, Altafonte, which has also removed them from Deezer, Apple Music and YouTube, as a reaction for not having revealed their nature when they hired their services. The non-band has already announced your Instagram account that they change distributors, and from December 18 the songs will return to platforms, as they are on Bandcampwhere they never left. A legal misstep (including the inability to collect royalties on songs) that has been referenced by a manifesto in which the group exposes its philosophy

You can be The Babes. This is the group’s proposal in the manifesto, which claims what the experiment has to offer: “The intention of Las Nenas was never to deceive anyone, but to enjoy some songs that we started making as a game and we thought they were so good.” that we wanted to share them.” All this remembering that “the lyrics are 100% human, even though the music is 95% inhuman, just as the covers and videos are also human.” Finally, they give instructions, prompts included, so that everyone can compose with the Udio app his own Las Nenas songs.

Are we all Las Nenas? The manifesto states that Las Nenas stops being a unidirectional project and becomes a collaborative one, and that is undoubtedly its most interesting approach. Leaving aside the very possible pecuniary intentions of the project – which were frustrated before their time -, the truth is that Las Nenas change focus only when the cake has been discovered: “If you manage to do something that you like, you can send it to us by email because we will love to hear new songs from Las Nenas”. On the one hand, there is a dangerous part in all this and that is that, as elDiario.es explains, there were people who came to buy their album and pay real money when they were still pretending to be a real group. On the other hand, it is an approach that, if the initial layer of deception is removed, may point to the most interesting aspect of the exploitation of generative AIs.

The toilet as a reference. As our colleague Santiago Sánchez-Migallón said, if we have agreed that a rotated and signed toilet is an essential work to understand contemporary art, and that remixing and fusion are creative tools as legitimate as the sheet music book, AI should be explored as a tool with which to shape ideas, steal those of others to transform them and create new avenues of expression. Ethical dilemmas? All of them in the world, as human creation has always had: to begin with, Duchamp never declared that he had built the toilet, and that is what makes Las Nenas’s manifesto sound false as it rushes forward.

The questionable use of other people’s property. Since their birth, generative AIs linked to creative professions, such as music or illustration and comics, have been surrounded by controversy. In most cases they draw on material that has previous authors and who have not given their permission to serve as inspiration. It is an issue not yet resolved and a capital point for the controversy that is pitting human creators against AIs. And to this is added the side, but essential, issue that Las Nenas not only did not say that they were not human, but that they posed as three women, which opens a discussion linked to the gender issue, and that is reminiscent of the controversy aroused by the Planeta Prize that Carmen Mola won, actually three men.

Can AI be art? A completely different position, once we have resolved the ethical and legal issues, is to allow oneself to be embraced by the lie (when it is declared, of course). An AI that allows you to generate songs from nothing (we insist: when that “nothing” is not necessarily a theft, or when that loan is authorized) should be a tool for composing as legitimate as a sound sequencer or the sampleswhere there is no real person creating the music, but rather a complex network of communicating vessels has been established between authors and replicators. Once again, technology points in a very suggestive direction, but first we humans have to discern how we are going to prevent it from becoming a tool of exploitation.

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