AI “actor” Tilly Norwood belted out the worst song I’ve ever heard

When production company Particle6 debuted its AI-generated “actor,” Tilly Norwood, last fall, the move was not warmly welcomed by Hollywood.

“Oh my God, we failed,” Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt said in an interview with Variety. “Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop.”

If only Particle6 had followed Blunt’s advice. Instead, the company released a music video for its AI character, which features a song called “Take the Lead.”

This is not clickbait. When I heard it, I thought it was the worst song I’d ever heard.

I was ready for Norwood’s musical debut like “How Was I Supposed to Know?”, the AI-generated song attributed to the digital persona Xania Monet, which turned heads when it hit the Billboard R&B charts. But Norwood’s song opened up a new level of frustration for artificial intelligence.

Eighteen people contributed to the Take the Lead video, including designers, directors, and editors. However, the song itself is about the challenges Tilly faces as an AI-generated character that critics disparage, because they believe she is not human.

“They say it’s not real, it’s fake,” Norwood growls into the camera. “But I’m still human, make no mistake.”

This means it is not true.

Music doesn’t have to be relatable to everyone, but maybe it should be relatable to at least one person. What’s most impressive about Norwood’s song is that the AI ​​character team was able to create a song about something no human would ever experience, because not everyone can relate to the feeling of being overlooked for being an AI.

The song, which sounds like a rip-off of Sara Bareilles, begins with the lines: “When they talk about me, they don’t see / The human spark and creativity.” The song begins as Norwood assures herself, “I’m not a doll, I’m the star.”

Then comes the chorus in which Norwood appeals to her fellow AI actors:

Actors, it’s time to take the plunge
Create the future, plant the seeds
Don’t leave, don’t fall behind
Make your own, and you’ll be free
We can expand, we can grow
Be the creators we’ve always known you to be
It’s the next evolution, can’t you see?
AI is not the enemy, it is the key

In the video, Norwood is seen strutting down a hallway in a data center, which is perhaps the only part of the video that relies on any element of sincerity. When the second chorus makes a predictable key change, she instead walks across the stage, looking out at a stadium full of cheering fake people who give her an undeserved “victory” moment.

You could make an argument that Norwood is trying to appeal to actors in general and not just the other AI characters. But the conclusion leaves no doubt that this is in fact a rallying cry from Tilly to her AI brethren:

Take your strength, take the stage
The next development is all the rage
Unlock everything, don’t hesitate
Actors of artificial intelligence, we create our own destiny

We don’t need this. We don’t need music from one AI character addressing other AI characters with a hopeful anthem about working together to prove judgmental humans wrong.

Twenty years ago, the influential music magazine Pitchfork gave Jett’s album “Shine On” a 0.0 out of 10. Instead of writing a review, it merely included a YouTube video of a monkey urinating in its mouth. Jet’s album isn’t hateful, but Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoff explained in a 2024 interview why the site’s writers were so angry about it all those years ago.

“Seeing mainstream rock music, which most of us grew up loving, become so exhausting and Xeroxed was disappointing,” he said.

These are the same complaints that artists today have about AI-generated works: these products ring hollow and simply reproduce the work of past artists.

“Tilly Norwood is not an actor; he is a character created by a computer program trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents actors, wrote in a statement last fall. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion, and from what we’ve seen, audiences have no interest in watching computer-generated content separate from the human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performers’ livelihoods and devaluing human art.”

While Jet was inspired by old rock bands to produce its “sexy and sexy” music, Tilly Norwood is literally derived from AI models that could not exist without the training data that tech companies took from artists without their consent.

I think Pitchfork jumped the gun. Twenty years later, they finally have a worthwhile topic.