When the production company Particle6 debuted its AI-generated “actor” Tilly Norwood last fall, the move was not warmly welcomed by Hollywood.
“Good Lord, we’re screwed,” Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt said in an interview with the industry publication Variety. “Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop.”
If only Particle6 followed Blunt’s advice. Instead, the company has put out a music video for its AI character, featuring a song called “Take the Lead.”
This is not clickbait. Upon listening to it, I actually think it is the worst song I have ever heard.
I was prepared for Norwood’s musical debut to sound something like “How Was I Supposed to Know?”, the AI-generated song attributed to the digital persona Xania Monet, which turned heads when it made it onto the Billboard R&B charts. Xania Monet’s AI-generated music isn’t my cup of tea, even if its lyrics are supposedly written by a real person — I personally prefer music that could exist without an AI music generator like Suno. But Norwood’s song has unlocked a new level of AI cringe.
Eighteen people contributed to the video for “Take the Lead,” including designers, prompters, and editors. Yet the song itself is about Tilly’s challenges as an AI-generated character who critics underestimate, because they believe she is not human.
“They say it’s not real, that it’s fake,” Norwood snarls at the camera. “But I am still human, make no mistake.”
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That is, to put it gently, not true.
Music does not have to be relatable to everyone, but perhaps it should be relatable to at least one person. What’s most impressive about Norwood’s song is that the AI character’s team managed to create a song about something that literally no human will ever experience, because no person can connect with the feeling of being disregarded for being an AI.
The song, which sounds like a Sara Bareillis rip-off, opens with the lines, “When they talk about me, they don’t see/The human spark, the creativity.” The song builds as Norwood affirms to herself, “I’m not a puppet, I’m the star.”
Then comes the chorus, in which Norwood appeals to her fellow AI actors:
Actors, it’s time to take the lead
Create the future, plant the seed
Don’t be left out, don’t fall behind
Build your own, and you’ll be free
We can scale, we can grow
Be the creators we’ve always known
It’s the next evolution, can’t you see?
AI’s not the enemy, it’s the key
In the video, Norwood struts down a hallway in a data center, which is perhaps the only part of the video grounded in any element of honesty. When the second chorus hits with a predictable key change, she instead walks across a stage, looking out into a stadium of cheering fake people who give her an undeserved moment of “triumph.”
You could make the argument that Norwood is trying to appeal to actors at large and not just other AI characters. But the outro leaves no question that this is, in fact, a rallying cry from Tilly to her AI brethren:
Take your power, take the stage
The next evolution is all the rage
Unlock it all, don’t hesitate
AI Actors, we create our fate
We do not need this. We do not need music from an AI persona addressing other AI personas with a hopeful anthem about working together to prove judgmental humans wrong.
Twenty years ago, the influential music publication Pitchfork gave Jet’s album “Shine On” a 0.0 out of 10. Instead of writing a review, they just embedded a YouTube video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth. The Jet album isn’t abhorrent, but Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef explained in a 2024 interview why the site’s writers had been so angry about it all those years ago.
“Seeing mainstream rock music, which of course most of us had grown up with a fondness for, become so knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed was disappointing,” he said.
These are the same complaints that artists have today about AI-generated works — these productions ring hollow and simply reproduce the work of artists past.
“‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor; it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors, wrote in a statement last fall. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered 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 performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.
While Jet was taking inspiration from older rock groups to make its “knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed” 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 worthy subject.
