AI-generated ‘celebrity’ Tilly Norwood is back again, this time with a caterwauling music video about how everyone’s been mean to her. Epitomising the phrase “fake it till you make it,” the British company Particle6 remains determined to turn its AI-generated character Tilly Norwood into a celebrity. Months after the firm’s initial attempts to make Norwood ... The gates of hell have cracked open, revealing a Tilly Norwood music video
AI-generated ‘celebrity’ Tilly Norwood is back again, this time with a caterwauling music video about how everyone’s been mean to her.
Epitomising the phrase “fake it till you make it,” the British company Particle6 remains determined to turn its AI-generated character Tilly Norwood into a celebrity.
Months after the firm’s initial attempts to make Norwood Instagram famous resulted in an angry backlash, it’s back again with a pop song and accompanying music video.
The song, Take The Lead, appears to be a joking attempt to respond to last year’s online rage – a reaction to the reaction, in effect.
“When they talk about me, they don’t see/The human spark, the creativity,” the song goes, before the chorus launches into hymn to the possibilities of gen-AI: “AI’s not the enemy, it’s the key…”
The song itself is, of course, awful: a sub-Disney, off-off-off-Broadway burst of wailing and caterwauling. Its music video continues where last year’s launch left off – presenting Norwood’s celebrity as a foregone conclusion, with fake appearances on talk shows, concert halls packed with adoring fans and allusions to pop stars that actually exist (even this middle-aged writer spotted the Miley Cyrus reference).
In what we’re guessing is an attempt to head off more fury from web users, the music video also opens with a blurb. It tells us that no fewer than 18 employees made the Take The Lead promo. Which begs the question: if you still need so many creative people to make a clip like this, why not just shoot it for real? Why do we even need pretend actors when we have real ones?
Particle6 is still insisting, as it did last year, that Norwood’s film debut is imminent. We’re interested to see how that will work out, given that the digital celeb’s look subtly changes between shots in this latest marketing drive. (Norwood’s makers also appear to have made her look visibly older, after a video released last year was taken to task for its sheer creepiness.)
While it’s easy to despair about the whole AI epoch, with Norwood being held up as the freckled face of progress, at least there are the YouTube comments to cheer us up.
“You know what. I’ll take lower RAM prices over content like this,” reads one.
“This song makes Rebecca Black’s Friday look like a masterpiece,” reads another.
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YouTube’s stats also suggest that the fake-it-till-you-make it approach isn’t going too well so far. Ms Norwood has just 3,730 subscribers on the platform so far, and the video’s been watched 22,544 times. Take the rage and hate-watching out of the equation, and there doesn’t appear to be a vast public appetite for a celebrity whose teeth are all exactly alike.
Philip K Dick once wrote that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
To butcher that quote somewhat, Tilly Norwood isn’t real, so let’s hope she does go away very soon.
Read more: Tilly Norwood | We can still fight back against the rise of creepy AI actors
