When production company Particle6 debuted AI-generated “character” Tilly Norwood last fall, the move was not warmly received by Hollywood.
“Good Lord, we’re spoiled,” said Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt in an interview with Variety. “Come on, agencies, don’t do that, please stop.”
If only Particle6 had followed Blunt’s advice. Instead, the company released a music video for its AI character, featuring the song “Take the Lead.”
This is not clickbait. When I listen to it, I actually think it’s the worst song I’ve ever heard.
I was prepared for Norwood’s first single to sound like “How Should I Know?”, a song produced by an AI called digital Xania Monet, which turned heads when it entered the Billboard R&B chart. Xania Monet’s music generated by AI is not my cup of tea, even if the lyrics are said to be written by a real person – I personally prefer music that can exist without an AI music generator like Suno. But Norwood’s song opened up a new level of AI cringe.
18 people contributed to the “Take the Lead” video, including designers, promoters, and editors. However, the song itself talks about Tilly’s challenges as an AI-generated character who criticizes her, because they believe she is not human.
“They say it’s not true, that it’s a lie,” Norwood yelled on camera. “But I’m still human, make no mistake.”
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Which is, to put it mildly, not true.
Music doesn’t have to relate to everyone, but it probably should to at least one person. What’s really impressive about Norwood’s song is that the AI character team was able to make a song about something that no one else will ever experience, because no one can relate to the feeling of being neglected because of being an AI.
The song, which sounds like a rip-off of Sara Bareillis, opens with the lines, “When they talk about me, they don’t see/The human spark, the intelligence.” The song builds as Norwood assures himself, “I’m not a doll, I’m a star.”
And then there’s the chorus, where Norwood pleads with his fellow AI players:
Actors, it’s lead time
Create the future, plant the seeds
Don’t be left out, don’t be left behind
Build your own, and you’ll be free
We can scale, we can grow
Be the creators we’ve always known
The next evolution, don’t you see?
AI is not the enemy, it is the key
In the video, Norwood walks down a hallway in a data center, possibly the only part of the video based on any element of credibility. When the second song hits with a predictable key change, he instead walks across the stage, toward a stadium of fake people who give him an awkward moment of “victory.”
You could make the argument that Norwood is trying to appeal to the characters as a whole and not just the other AI characters. But the outro leaves no question that this is, in fact, a cry from Tilly to her AI brethren:
Take your strength, step on stage
The next evolution is all the rage
Open it all up, don’t hesitate
AI characters, we create our own destiny
We don’t need this. We don’t need music from an AI human speaking to other AI humans in a hymn of hope 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 just embed a YouTube video of a monkey peeing in its own mouth. Jet’s album isn’t bad, but Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef explained in a 2024 interview why the site’s writers were so angry all those years ago.
“To see mainstream rock music, which most of us grew up loving, struggling and Xeroxed was disappointing,” he said.
These are the same complaints that artists have today about AI-generated works – these products are unheard of and simply reproduce the work of artists of the past.
“‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actress; she is a computer-generated actress trained for the job of many professional actors – without permission or compensation,” SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors, wrote in a statement last fall. “It has no life experience to absorb, it has no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences are not interested in watching computer-generated content that isn’t connected to human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ – it creates the problem of using stolen games to exclude players, endangering players’ lives and degrading human creativity.
While Jet took inspiration from old rock bands to make their “knuckle-pull and Xeroxed” music, Tilly Norwood was literally drawn from AI models that wouldn’t exist without training data that tech companies take from musicians without their consent.
I think Pitchfork jumped the gun. Twenty years later, they finally had a worthy lesson.
