The appreciation of a piece is often an act of empathy: to reflect and delve into it, one must put oneself in the shoes of the people who created it and contextualize the fruit of their labor in a specific moment in space-time.
That is why the same creation can be interpreted in different ways, and this is where expectations play a crucial role. It’s not the same for Billie Eilish to get only a million streams on her latest single as it is for a newly formed band.
But beyond numerical values, expectations and trust play a fundamental role in the tacit agreement between artists and the public: don’t lie to us.
Because, what happens if an entire industry is flooded with artificial content or simply lies?
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in the Publishing World
Indeed, according to a study by Cornell and the University of Minnesota conducted between 2025 and 2026, 60% of newly published ebooks contained detectable AI-generated content. Travel books multiplied by 9, sports books by almost 7, and self-help books by 5.
Note, this last piece of data regarding the increase in the volume of published books could stem from improved editing efficiency (I myself edit my texts using AI to correct grammatical errors or point out repetitive expressions), but the first figure, highlighting that more than half of ebooks contain traces of AI, is devastating.
It’s not that AI creation is bad per se; it can actually be helpful in certain contexts. However, precisely in fields like art, it can have dire consequences, potentially atrophying and culturally stagnating a society, preventing it from advancing in its thought as we have done throughout history.
Is Lying Something New?
Nothing could be further from the truth; deception is not new in this field and is intrinsic to human beings, as lying requires intention.
Milli Vanilli deceived millions of people for a time (perhaps some Milli Vanilli have slipped past us that we’ll never know, oh, the false negatives!), but also Tony Clifton (Andy Kaufman‘s alter ego) performed in several places at once and we find it funny today, precisely because he was a mischievous standup comedian (therein lies the importance of context).
What changes today is the scale and distribution networks. Cases like the aforementioned Milli Vanilli or Andy Kaufman were isolated incidents compared to the immense ease of creation and dissemination that exists today.
Can Artificial Content Be Interesting?
In this section, we can observe different behaviors in the world of information and in music. In the former, synthetic content already succeeds; in music, it does not, but, paradoxically, it thrives and fails for exactly the same mechanism: emotion, drama.
The internet is plagued with fake news that achieves its objective (in the sense that it is read, shared, and captures attention) due to something as human as reinforcing our own biases or a kind of tribalism when trying to attack someone we consider to be the opposing side on a specific issue. But they do not depend on physical presence in any way.
In music, this doesn’t happen, at least not in the same way. There’s a growing interest in unique events, such as concerts or festivals; it also helps that album sales no longer account for as large a percentage of artists’ income as they did last century, but this is another consequence of large-scale distribution. Not everything comes from AI, friends.
And since we’re talking about unique events, let’s talk about sports; football competitions like the Champions League, LaLiga, or the Premier League, American sports leagues like the NFL or the NBA, year after year, continue to break revenue records due to the increased interest they generate across our world. Why? Because of the drama, the emotion, the not knowing exactly what to expect from a specific match or season; that is precisely their value.
In any case, if there’s one discipline where we can already see the 360º impact of technology, it’s chess. We are all aware of how computing can help a Grandmaster continue to improve, but we are also all aware that the same machine can beat the Grandmaster however and whenever it wants.
Well, that said, non-human chess championships already exist, which are followed and can serve as experimental laboratories to refine technology, but the audience is not comparable to that of human tournaments. This is because the value itself is the experience of emotion, the drama of a decision, the magic of a move, and without intention, without purpose, friends, that simply does not exist.
The Importance of Trust
It is for all these reasons that trust is vital. If the foundations of any competition or discipline are not clear, they lose all their essence and are exposed to serious danger.
We need to know for certain that a chess player is playing a competition by themselves, because we are not interested in the perfect move, we are interested in their perfect move.
We need to know for certain that no one is cheating to bypass the NBA salary cap, a foundational rule of the league.
We need to know for certain that a competition is not rigged, because otherwise, what’s the point of watching it?
We need to be clear about what a band is doing live, because to hit play, we already have our player at home.
In a society where the volume of content available to us is so vast, paradoxically, it becomes more difficult to find valuable information, to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Hence, faith in our close network, in credible sources, or in media outlets without perverse incentives is vital today.
Stopping the consumption of clickbait media (no, “You won’t believe what Josh Homme did at his last concert” is not a reliable headline), or consulting multiple sources to verify over time who is being honest and who isn’t, are key to gradually evolving.
And as we say, trust can only be built in one way: with reliability over time. So:
Habrá que levantarse a construir (We’ll have to get up and build)
Habrá que levantarse a trabajar (We’ll have to get up and work)
Por algo mejor (For something better)
Candelabro – Fracaso