When production company Particle6 debuted its AI-generated “actor,” Tilly Norwood, last fall, the move was not well received by Hollywood.
“Oh my God, we’re screwed,” Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt saying in an interview with industry publication Variety. “Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop.”
If only Particle6 would follow Blunt’s advice. Instead, the company released a music video for its AI character, featuring a song called “Take the lead.”
This is not click bait. Listening to it, I think it’s the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life.
I was prepared for Norwood’s musical debut to sound something like “How Was I Supposed to Know?,” the AI-generated song credited to digital persona Xania Monet, which garnered attention when it hit Billboard’s R&B charts. Xania Monet’s AI-generated music is not 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 shame for AI.
Eighteen people contributed to the “Take the Lead” video, including designers, scorers, and editors. However, the song itself is about Tilly’s challenges as an AI-generated character that critics underestimate because they believe she is not human.
“They say it’s not real, it’s fake,” Norwood snarls at the camera. “But I’m still human, make no mistake.”
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I mean, to put it mildly, it’s not true.
Music doesn’t have to be relatable to everyone, but maybe it should be relatable to at least one person. The most impressive thing about Norwood’s song is that the AI character 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 ignored for being an AI.
The song, which sounds like a Sara Bareillis rip-off, begins with the lines: “When they talk about me, they don’t see/The human spark, the creativity.” The song unfolds as Norwood asserts herself, “I’m not a puppet, I’m the star.”
Then comes the chorus, in which Norwood appeals to his fellow AI actors:
Actors, it’s time to take the initiative.
Create the future, plant the seed.
Don’t be left out, don’t be left behind
Create your own and you will be free
We can scale, we can grow
Be the creators we’ve always known
It’s the next evolution, don’t you see?
AI is not the enemy, it is the key
In the video, Norwood struts down a hallway in a data center, which is perhaps the only part of the video based on any element of honesty. When the second chorus arrives with a predictable key change, she crosses a stage and looks towards a stadium full of fake people who cheer her on and give her an undeserved moment of “triumph.”
One could argue that Norwood is trying to appeal to actors in general and not just other AI characters. But the ending leaves no doubt that this is, in fact, a rallying cry from Tilly to her AI brethren:
Take your power, take the stage
The next evolution is in fashion
Unlock everything, don’t hesitate
AI actors, we create our destiny
We don’t need this. We don’t need music from an AI person addressing other AI people with a hopeful anthem about working together to prove judgmental humans wrong.
Twenty years ago, influential music publication Pitchfork gave Jet’s album “Shine On” a 0.0 out of 10. Instead of writing a review, they simply embedded a YouTube video of a monkey that urinates in its own mouth. The Jet album is not hateful, 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 fond of, become so heavy and photocopied 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 of the past.
“‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor; he is a character generated by a computer program that was trained in the work of countless professional artists, 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 aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered to human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problems’: it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, endangering the livelihoods of artists and devaluing human art.
While Jet drew inspiration from older rock groups to make its knuckleball and photocopied music, Tilly Norwood is literally derived from artificial intelligence models that couldn’t exist without the training data that tech companies took from artists without their consent.
I think Pitchfork got ahead of itself. Twenty years later, they finally have a worthy theme.
