"AI rapper" FN Meka isn't human - he's a digital creation of a company. But that didn't stop him from getting a record deal! He briefly became the first digital rapper to sign a deal with a major recording company. That is until the entire internet said NOPE. From Lil Miquela to Shudu, let's talk about the complicated history of digital talent.v
There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of I Heart Radio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget Todd, and this is there are No Girls on the Internet. Do you need to be a human to be an influencer? Or how about a rapper? What about a model? It turns out, maybe not entirely. Digital creations are landing brand deals and record deals and modeling contracts, and it might sound super cool and futuristic, but it's also raising some very real questions. So let's get into what's going on and talk about some of the history behind virtual talent. So last week, Capital Records announced that they signed a record deal with a digital rapper called f n Mecca, who became the first ever digital artist to sign with a major recording label. But the deal also came with accusations of digital black based cultural appropriation and the digital exploitation of blackness. So just a eleven short days later, the deal was terminated and the label said it was cutting ties with the rapper because pretty much everybody's reaction was like, wait, no, this is bad. So f and Mecca was designed to look like a very specific type of rapper. He rocks, bright green braids, half of the shaved head, face, tattoos, and the gold grill over his teeth, kind of like the rapper six nine. He wraps about cars and cash and diamonds and expensive watches, another pretty stereotypical trappings of rap music. He also uses the N word in his wraps, and it's posted content on his social media platforms that just did not sit right with people because he's not black. I mean, he's not anything. He's not a human at all. So, just in case it's not clear, fn Mecca is not real. He's an avatar, a digital creation of a media company called Factory New, started by Anthony Martini and Brandon Lely, neither of hum are black. They describe Factory New as a first of its kind, next generation of music companies specializing in virtual beings, so kind of like a talent agency for digital creations and avatars. They've also created a crypto wrapper called little Bitcoin, which side note kind of sounds like a project designed in a labs specifically for me to hate it. But back to Ethan Mecca. While he may not be real, he does still have a very real, big digital footprint with ten point three million followers on TikTok and two and two thousand followers on his verified Instagram account, So how did FN come to be well? In interview with Music Business Weekly, Anthony Martini, the executive at New Factory, explained saying, not to get all philosophical, but what is an artist today? Think about the biggest stars in the world, how many of them are just vessels for commercial endeavors. So what he's basically arguing is that if we mostly engaged with artists vias greens, then they don't really need to exist outside of those screens to be relevant. He also talked about how scouting for fresh, new human talent involves a lot of work, scouring the internet for fresh talent, flying out to concerts and meetings, and if you just create a digital avatar, you cut out all of that work. Anthony Martini goes on to explain how their avatar talents are made using thousands of data points compiled from video games and social media, and that Factory New has developed a proprietary AI technology that analyzes certain popular songs and generates recommendations for various elements of song construction like lyrical content, chords, melodies, tempo, sounds, et cetera. You get the idea. Fan Mecca's debut single called Florida Water, features the actual human rapper Gunna and human gaming streamer Clicks, but the reaction to fn Mecca has been not good, to say the very least, in addition to his use of the N word in its songs. Because the whole idea is to make it seem like Ethn Meca has a real life despite not being a real human. They really fleshed out his universe with images and videos, including one pretty cringeing image of himself being assaulted by a police officer while in prison, posted on his Instagram account with the caption police brutality. What should I do? Prison guards keep beating me with the baton because I won't snitch. I ain't no rat, So I have to say. I just do not like this at all. It feels like a media venture that is not run by black people, capitalizing off of black trauma, black pain, and harmful stereotypes about blackness in this really shallow and stereotypical way, and it also raises questions about digital black face. Digital black face is a term popularized by Lauren Michelle Jackson, a feminist scholar and writer in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University and the author of the book on cultural appropriation called White Negroes. She describes digital black face as using the relative anonymity of online identity to embody blackness. It can be things like using reaction gifts of black people on social media if you yourself are not black, or in some cases, adopting an entire black online persona, like the owners of the popular vegan cooking website formally called Thug Kitchen, who built an entire successful online brand off of adopting a really stereotypical black scent in their recipes before eventually changing the name. And I guess that's kind of what doesn't sit right with me about this AI rapper. If f N isn't a human, why go out of your way to depict him in such highly racialized ways. If you're not trying to capitalize on a perceived proximity to blackness, it just feels really exploitative. Industry blackout, a collective of black people in the entertainment industry committed to changing the community, also didn't love it. You might recall that we've actually talked about industry Blackout once before, during our episode about Blackout Day Back Industry. Blackout responded to the news of f N being signed to Capital in an open letter, writing, while we applaud the innovation in tech that connects listeners to music and enhances the experience, we find fault with the lack of awareness and how offensive this caricature is. It is a direct insult to the Black community and our culture. An amalgamation of gross stereotypes, appropriative mannerisms that derived from black artists, complete with slurs infused in lyrics. This digital effigy is a careless abomination and disrespectful to real people who face real consequences in real life. For example, Gonna, a black artist who is featured on a song with FN Mecca, is currently incarcerated for wrapping the same type of lyrics this robot mimics the differences Your artificial rapper will not be subject to federal charges for such. For your company to approve this shows a serious lack of diversity and a resounding amount of tone deaf leadership. This is simply unacceptable and will not be tolerated, which prompted Capital to respond by cutting ties with FN and releasing a statement saying we offer our deepest apologies to the black community for incensitivity in signing this project without asking enough questions about equity and the creative process behind it. We thank those of you who reached out to us with constructive feedback on the past couple of days. Your input was invaluable as we came to the decision to end our association with this project. In response to all this, Anthony Martini, the New Factory executive behind FN Mecca, didn't interview with The New York Times, and it really just made me feel like he did not get it. Initially, he told the Times that blogs latched onto a clickbait headline and created this narrative, And in response to that cringe e photo of FN Mecca being roughed up by police, he said, quote some of the early content, now, if you take it out of context, it obviously looks worse or different than it was intended. And even though in that earlier interview that he did with Music Business Weekly where he was really hyping that Mecca's lyrics were generated using the company's proprietary AI software. In the interview he did with The New York Times after the controversy, Anthony Martini really walked that back, saying that S and Mecca was in fact primarily an anonymous human rapper who was black. It's not this malicious plan of white executives. It's literally no different from managing a human artist, except its digital, he added. He also said that the team behind F and Mecca was quote, actually one of the most diverse teams you can get. I'm the only white person involved. So this explanation was further complicated by the fact that the anonymous black rapper that he was talking about F and Mecca being based on has actually spoken up and said that Martini's company basically just stole his likeness and his voice without credit or compensation. Rapper Kyle the Hooligan said that New Factory approached him to be the voice of F and Mecca in exchange for equity in the company and then basically ghosted him, like use my voice, use my sound, use the culture, and literally this left me high and dry. I didn't get a dime off of nothing, and they got record deals all this stuff. I wasn't involved in, no meetings or none of that, he said. So, after really defending this project to The New York Times, Martini must have had a change of heart, because just a few days later, he announced that he was also cutting ties with the project, writing it's become apparent that I should have done more diligence before joining. In the past few days, I've learned of Kyle the Hooligan's experience with Mecca, which is deeply at odds with my core values. I believe that artists must always be at the center of the creative process and must be fairly compensated. Mecca is not the only digital creation making deals despite not even being human. Let's have a quick break at her back. Brazilian model and singer Little Michela was hired as the arts editor at the Ultra Hip Days magazine. She gets sponsored content deals with some of the biggest brands and fashion like product and has been photographed hanging out with some of the biggest celebrities like Tracy Ellis, Ross Diplow and Millie Bobby Brown. She's been interviewed by Vogue and The Guardian, and was in a Kelvin Klein spread alongside model Bella hadid In. Little Michaela was named one of Time magazines twenty five most influential people on the Internet, only She's not real. Little Michaela is a fictional AI rendering of the perfect instagram It girl. Braud, the company behind Michaela, is valued at a hundred and twenty five million dollars. Little Michaela is considered the world's first virtual influencer. She joined Instagram back in She became the first digital avatar to ever sign with a talent agency when she inked an tracked with c a A, becoming the company's first ever virtual client. So Michaela is really interesting. Her features are designed to be non white, but they still exist along a pretty conventional Eurocentric beauty standard. Like it almost seems like her creators were trying to pluck aspects from black, white and Latino women that are considered traditionally desirable, and through the power of digital rendering, put them all together on one perfect looking person. She has edgy street style, a tan complexion of curbacious but on upturned nose, and freckles, and it really re establishes a well worn beauty standard that would be difficult for any human woman to embody, but it's easy for her because she isn't real. Little Michaela's whole thing as an influencer is being authentic and relatable. She has dramas and breakups just like humans doom. She's also really aligned with social justice and activism. She's advocated for lgbt Q causes and Black lives matter. But in twenty nineteen, the humans who control her took it way too far. Michaela released a video where she described being assaulted by a man in a ride share. She said, sure enough, I feel this guy's cold, meaty hand touched my leg as if confirming that I'm real. His hand literally lingers there rubbing my skin, and people really did not like it. It just felt like a profitable media company was both trivializing and capitalizing all of assault, a situation that far too many of us have actually experienced in real life. Well, Michaela isn't real, so her creators dreaming up a sexual assault for her to go through just feels kind of gross. Or take the black fashion model, shoot you Graham. She has a deep, dark complexion and her Instagram posts are always hashtag with things like hashtag melanin, hashtag black girl magic. Her image was even reposted by Rihanna's Fanti Cosmetics, a makeup line known for its inclusive shades for darker complexions. Shootings deep dark skin is oh flawless. It seems unreal, and that's probably because she's not real. Shooto is considered the first digital supermodel, and she was made using a digital three D modeling program by a white male fashion photographer in London named Cameron James Wilson. In an interview with Bizarre, Wilson said that basically, Shooto is my creation. She's my art that I'm working on at the moment. She's not a real model, unfortunately, but she represents a lot of real models today. There's a big kind of movement with dark skin models, so she represents them and is inspired by them. Wilson maintains that he did not have any ill intentions in creating Shoodo, saying it's meant to be beautiful art which empowers people. It's not trying to take away an opportunity from anyone or replace anyone. She's trying to complement those people. And he may very well have great intentions, but speaking as a real darkly scanned black woman who is a human, it honestly doesn't feel great to have someone who wouldn't know anything about what that experience is like for us to be capitalizing on it. Wilson points out that the digital creations of black women that he makes are based on real human Black women who might have some level of involvement in this project. He's described them as his muses, but being a mused does not necessarily mean having a lot of agency or say and how this project shows up in the world, Like neither Shoe Doo or Wilson as her creator, would have any idea what it's actually like to not be able to find makeup dark enough for your skin tone. And that's because Wilson is a white man, and she do doesn't actually have any skin because she's not a real person. We humans did not just decide to try on our blackness, but the people who make these digital avatars did get to decide to create them in this way without necessarily having to understand with, or grapple with, or even really engage with all of the culture or baggage or history that comes along with it. And I can absolutely see a world where brands and talent agencies with much rather work with a digital avatar meant to mimic blackness rather than an actual black human being. Because think about it that avatar is never going to call them out for saying or doing something insensitive and will never express any agency at all because they're not actually real. It seems really easy to create an ecosystem where digital imitations of blackness become more desirable, not to mention, more profitable than the real human thing. Dr Francesca, who researches digital media, really summed it up nicely and a piece for the Conversation. She writes, many black c g I influencers and their origin stories represent pervasive marketplace demand for impersonations of black people that center to what maybe warped ideas about black life, culture and embodiment. I appreciate the work of black people seeking to change the industry, and I am interested in how the future of black c g I influencers may be shaped by Black people who are both creators and muses. And I think that there is just really something weird about the fact that Little MICHAELA Shoo Doo and fn Mecca get actual deals that involve actual human dollars. Companies and brands get to feel like they're collaborating with black and brown creators when they work with these kinds of digital talents, but really they're not. They're just giving money to the companies who create them, and it kind of just seems like another opportunity to marginalize people who are already marginalized in these spaces. Like if brands wanted to work with a queer Brazilian teenager like Little Michaela, or a darker skin model like Shooto, or a rapper who's been to prison like fn Mecca, they could actually book humans with those actual identities or lived experiences, not a digital rendering of one. So listen, I am fully aware that I probably sound like a bit of a curmudgeon here, but that's not it at all. Actually, I am very excited about this kind of technology and how it might be you and things like media, music, and art. There's an entire future of possibility where things like AI and avatars blow up boundaries around how we think about race, gender, sexuality, ability, and more in really interesting and innovative ways. But when you look at a project like s and Mecca, it's so clear that that same technology could just be used to reinforce and double back down on the same harmful, tired stereotypes and tropes that we already experience in the real world, which is just so sad. With technology, the possibilities are so vast, so it's sad to see it be used to reinforce the same tired, hurtful sticks. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech. I just want to say Hi. You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Brigitad. It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcast from iHeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.