AI performer Tilly Norwood releases widely criticised song

When production company Particle6 introduced its AI-generated “actor” Tilly Norwood last fall, the reaction from Hollywood was far from enthusiastic.

“Good Lord, 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.”

Particle6, however, did not appear to take that advice to heart. The company has now released a music video for its AI character, built around a song titled “Take the Lead.”

This is not exaggeration for effect. After listening to it, it may be the worst song I have ever heard.

Before hearing Norwood’s musical debut, I expected something more along the lines of “How Was I Supposed to Know?,” the AI-generated track credited to the digital persona Xania Monet, which drew attention after landing on the Billboard R&B charts. Xania Monet’s AI-generated music is not especially appealing to me, even if a real person supposedly writes the lyrics — I personally prefer music that could exist without an AI music generator like Suno. But Norwood’s song reaches an entirely different level of AI-induced embarrassment.

Eighteen people are credited with contributing to the “Take the Lead” video, including designers, prompters, and editors. Yet the song centres on Tilly’s struggles as an AI-generated character, underestimated by critics who believe she is not human.

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

That is, to put it mildly, not accurate.

Music does not have to resonate with everyone, but it should resonate with at least one person. The most remarkable thing about Norwood’s song is that her team managed to create a track about something that no human being will ever actually experience, because no real person can relate to being dismissed for being an AI.

The song, which sounds like an imitation of Sara Bareilles, begins with the lines, “When they talk about me, they don’t see/The human spark, the creativity.” As it builds, Norwood reassures herself by singing, “I’m not a puppet, I’m the star.”

Then the chorus arrives, with Norwood appealing to 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 walks confidently down a hallway inside a data centre, which may be the only part of the production that feels rooted in any real honesty. When the second chorus arrives, complete with a predictable key change, she appears on a stage, gazing out at a stadium filled with cheering fake people who hand her a completely unearned moment of supposed triumph.

Norwood is trying to speak to actors in general rather than just AI-generated ones. But the outro removes any uncertainty that this is meant as a rallying cry from Tilly to her AI counterparts:

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 a song from an AI persona addressing other AI personas with an uplifting anthem urging them to join forces and prove sceptical humans wrong.

Two decades ago, the influential music publication Pitchfork gave Jet’s album “Shine On” a score of 0.0 out of 10. Instead of publishing a traditional review, the outlet embedded a YouTube video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth. The Jet album is not truly offensive in any meaningful sense, but Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef explained in a 2024 interview why the site’s writers had reacted so harshly at the time.

“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.

Those same complaints are now being voiced by artists about AI-generated work — that these productions feel empty and merely copy the work of earlier artists.

“‘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, said 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, jeopardising performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”

While Jet took inspiration from older rock bands to create the sort of “knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed” music Plagenhoef described, Tilly Norwood is quite literally the product of AI models that would not exist without training data taken by tech companies from artists without their consent.

It seems Pitchfork may have been early. Twenty years later, it has finally found a more deserving target.