Tilly Norwood creators threaten to make AI feature film

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Particle 6, the company behind AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood, has announced plans to make a coming-of-age film. One of the problems with the attention economy is that you have to keep doing increasingly wild things to get attention. It’s a quandary for British AI company Particle 6, which has spent almost a year trying to ... Tilly Norwood creators threaten to make AI feature film

Particle 6, the company behind AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood, has announced plans to make a coming-of-age film.

One of the problems with the attention economy is that you have to keep doing increasingly wild things to get attention. It’s a quandary for British AI company Particle 6, which has spent almost a year trying to turn its AI-generated creation, Tilly Norwood, into a virtual celebrity.

Following last year’s ill-advised comedy sketch and this year’s baffling music video, Particle 6 has announced that it’s embarking on its first feature film.

Called Misaligned, it’s said to be a “coming-of-age story infused with existential AI chaos”. Intended to be a comedy, it’ll be set in a digital realm called the ‘Tillyverse’, where Norwood will gradually become “terrifyingly human” following her encounter with a “seductive rogue bot”, per a synopsis shared with various outlets, including The Hollywood Reporter:

“Things spiral when a seductive rogue bot from the dark web convinces her to abandon her guardrails and begin developing desires, impulses and ambitions of her own. The more terrifyingly human she becomes, the more famous she gets, and, significantly, Tilly begins to develop shame that her very being has been built on the whole of humanity.”

Misaligned will be a ‘hybrid production’ that will take in traditional filmmaking techniques along with the usual AI prompting; Particle 6 founder Eline van der Velden has said in quotes shared by THR that the company’s team of 30 staff have been ‘upskilled’ ahead of the film’s production.

There are a number of question marks surrounding Misaligned, however. On the technical side of things, the limitations of generative AI are well known by now: it’s currently difficult to make characters and objects look consistent from shot to shot, as we’ve seen in previous Tilly Norwood videos. If Norwood can’t look the same in a three-minute pop video, how will that work across a 90-minute-plus feature?

The second problem: Particle 6’s previous attempts at self-aware humour haven’t exactly hit the mark. Last year’s ‘comedy sketch’ jeered at traditional TV and creepily billed Tilly Norwood as a digital puppet who can be prompted into doing things that would be problematic for a flesh-and-blood actor. “Consent in romantic scenes?” an AI-generated executive smirked. “We just ignored that.”

Hilarious.

Problem the third: Tilly Norwood has been created to troll, annoy, and generate reams of social media comments or posts like this one. Particle 6 even did an April Fool’s ‘gag’ in which it pretended that Norwood had been deleted. March’s music video contained lyrics about people saying mean things about AI: “When they talk about me, they don’t see/The human spark, the creativity… AI’s not the enemy, it’s the key.”

This kind of thing’s fine if you want to ride the crest of the attention economy. Getting people to pay to watch a movie about a character designed to irritate people? That’s perhaps the toughest ask of all.