AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood put 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.

“Good God, we’re screwed,” Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt said in an interview with industry publication Variety. “Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop.”

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

This is not clickbait. When I listen to it, I actually think this is the worst song I’ve 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 that turned heads when it hit the Billboard R&B charts. Xania Monet’s AI-generated music isn’t my thing, even though the lyrics are supposedly written by a real person. Personally, I 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 that critics underestimate because they think she’s not human.

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

That is, to say the least: not true.

Music doesn’t have to be recognizable to everyone, but maybe it is to at least one person. The most impressive thing 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 one can relate to the feeling of being ignored 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 it / The human spark, the creativity.” The song builds as Norwood says to himself, “I’m not a pop, I’m the star.”

Then comes the chorus, in which Norwood addresses her fellow AI actors:

Actors, it’s time to take the lead
Create the future, plant the seed
Don’t get left out, don’t fall behind
Build your own, and you will be free
We can scale up, we can grow
Be the creators we’ve always known
It’s the next evolution, can’t you see?
AI is not the enemy, it is the key

In the video, Norwood walks down a hallway in a data center, which is perhaps the only part of the video that has any element of honesty. When the second chorus comes out with a predictable key change, she instead walks across a stage and looks out into a stadium full of cheering fake people who give her an undeserved moment of “triumph.”

You could argue that Norwood is trying to appeal to actors in general and not just other AI characters. But the outro 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 evolution is a fad
Unlock it all, don’t hesitate
AI actors, we create our destiny

We don’t need this. We don’t 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 simply embedded a YouTube video of a monkey peeing in his own mouth. The Jet album isn’t repulsive, but Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef is explained in a 2024 interview why the site’s writers had been so angry about it all those years ago.

“It was disappointing to see mainstream rock music, which most of us had obviously grown up loving, become so compelling and Xeroxed,” he said.

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

“Tilly Norwood is not an actor; she is a character generated 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 statement last fall. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences are not interested in watching computer-generated content apart from the human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ – it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, endangering performers’ livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.

While Jet took inspiration from older rock groups to create his “knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed” music, Tilly Norwood is literally derived from AI models that couldn’t 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.