“Take the Lead” by Tilly Norwood Lowers the Bar for AI Entertainment

Written by Sean Merkel

Last September, at the Zurich film festival, the world was greeted with the announcement of the first AI Actor. Her name is Tilly Norwood, and she was ready to take Hollywood by storm.

Immediately following the news of Norwood’s entrance onto the scene, actors came out to criticize Norwood’s creation, and the company responsible, Particle6. AI actors in movies threaten the whole industry, and allowing them into films and television will degrade the movie process at every level. Time passed, people forgot and the news cycle moved on. Then, on March 10, they made a music video.

The philosophy behind the new Tilly Norwood AI music video, “Take the Lead,” is simple: people just don’t understand how much AI can do for them. Still, all these years later, we simply can’t grasp that AI makes everything better for us, and we need the power of song to teach us the error of our ways. The song says as much: “AI is not the enemy, it’s the key.” One day we’ll see Tilly and all her computer friends are here to help us.

Before continuing, it is important to remember that Tilly Norwood is not a human being. As AI advertisers flirt more with the idea of their product being sentient, saying this becomes even more crucial. She is a compilation of thousands of lines of code given the appearance of an unholy amalgam of young actresses. Tilly Norwood should be referred to as “she” or “her” in the same way that the captain of the Titanic might say “she’s unsinkable.” The following is going to be a series of insults directed at Tilly Norwood, so rather than picture an actual human woman, it would be more helpful to imagine a toaster with a smiley face drawn on it.

In some ways, AI images have come a long way. In “Take the Lead,” Tilly Norwood delivers what is basically a coherent message throughout a series of recognizable locations and with a visual storyline. Tilly sings about how the insults really hurt her, then goes into a big musical number about how great AI is for art. There is a lot of movement in the video that looks basically natural: walking, jumping up and down, all the other stuff that human digital animators figured out when they made Toy Story 3 decades ago. In terms of music videos, it certainly is one.

Now, the scale of what AI can do is supposed to be very impressive, but if this stuff is supposed to be replacing human actors, singers, cinematographers and editors, then it should be able to create something at least as good as a movie that came out in 1995. “Take the Lead” fails this test. The imagery in the music has that classic AI problem of looking too shiny, while the song itself is repetitive, boring and flat. The lyrics are dull, somewhat inspirational lines about believing in yourself mixed with taglines from AI advertising campaigns. They oscillate back and forth between cliché and unintelligible. Here’s a sample of what is supposed to be the future of creativity: “It’s not a trick, it’s just the start, a chance to own what we impart. From performance to creation’s crown, we can be both up and down.” As with all AI writing, it almost makes sense, and it glides off the human mind without causing too much friction.

For all she’s doing to try to take real acting jobs away from people, Tilly Norwood and AI in general are still firmly in uncanny valley territory. Her face keeps changing slightly from shot to shot, and her face cannot decide on how many freckles she has or where they might be located. Her voice contains that hackle-raising quality that can only be possessed by a thing without a soul. AI text is still an abomination of squiggles and lines that clearly requires a great deal of editing to make it legible. Tilly Norwood feels less like the future of the entertainment industry and more like a vampire asking if she could please come inside to use the phone.

Talk to any real professional, and they will likely tell you how much the details matter to them. Every line, every curve, is intentional, planned, meticulous. They don’t want to put out a product that looks sloppy. AI creators don’t give a shit. Oh, the shot of the iconic Grauman’s Chinese Theater in LA says “CHNESSE”? Well it will only be on screen for one second, who cares? The whole video is littered with little moments that show not just disregard for attention to detail, but complete disdain for the concept. The video boasts that 18 real humans were involved in making it, and even claims some of those people were editors, which raises the question: what did this look like before editing?

Tilly isn’t going anywhere, for now. She’s young, she’s pretty and, best of all, she’ll never try to negotiate a better contract for herself. To studios, that makes her the perfect star. To the rest of us, they’re going to spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to make us accept it. “It’s the next evolution, can’t you see?” as the song says. AI never has to be good, it just has to be good enough.

Fortunately, it seems like studios have largely given up on making AI better and instead have devoted most of their energy to lowering our expectations of what counts as good enough. When Tilly Norwood was announced, many famous actors spoke out against her. So far, only 237,000 people have watched “Take the Lead.” It seems that she doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the acting business. It seems like, right now, Tilly Norwood is not good enough.