When production company Particle6 debuted AI-generated “actor” Tilly Norwood last fall, the move was not well received by Hollywood.
“Good Lord, we fought,” Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt he said in an interview with industry publication Variety. “Come on, agencies, don’t do this. Stop it.”
If only Particle6 would follow Blunt’s advice. Instead, the company released a music video for the AI character, with a song called “Take the lead.”
This is not clickbait. When I heard it, I think it’s 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 digital persona Xania Monet that made headlines when it hit the Billboard R&B charts. Xania Monet’s AI-generated music is not my cup of tea, even if her lyrics are supposed to be 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 “Take the Lead” video, including designers, candidates and editors. However, 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 growls into the camera. “But I’m still human, make no mistake.”
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That is, to put it mildly, 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’s team managed to create a song about something that literally no human will ever experience, because no one can relate to feeling scorned 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 assures 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 star
Create the future, plant the seed
Don’t be left out, don’t fall behind
Make 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 falls down a hallway in a data center, which is perhaps the only part of the video that relies on any element of honesty. When the second chorus hits with a predictable key change, she instead cuts to a scene, looking out onto a field of fake cheering people who give her an unfair 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 siblings:
Take your power, take the stage
The next development is all the rage
Unlock them all, don’t hesitate
AI actors, we create our own destiny
We don’t need that. We don’t need music from an AI persona addressing other AI personas with a hopeful hymn about cooperation to prove the naysayers 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 peeing in her mouth. The Jet album isn’t despicable, but Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef is he explained in a 2024 interview why were the site writers so mad about it all those years ago.
“Seeing mainstream rock music, which of course most of us had grown up loving, becomes so stressful and Xeroxed was disappointing,” he said.
These are the same complaints that artists today have about AI-generated works – these productions are hollow and merely reproduce the work of artists of the past.
“‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor; she is a character created by a computer program trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” wrote SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors. statement last fall. “It has no life experience, no emotion, and from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content without the human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, endangering artists’ livelihoods and devaluing the human artist.”
While Jet took inspiration from past rock bands to make his music “knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed,” Tilly Norwood literally derives from AI models that couldn’t exist without the training data tech companies received from artists without their consent.
I think Pitchfork jumped the gun. Twenty years later, they finally have a worthy subject.
