AI "actor" Tilly Norwood is going viral after abruptly switching from English to Cantonese in the middle of an interview, and the bizarre moment has reignited an already messy debate about her existence.
If you haven't heard of Tilly before, she's a completely AI-generated character created by Particle6 founder Eline Van der Velden. She first became a huge talking point last year when Eline said talent agencies were interested in representing her, and she's now promoting her feature-film debut, Misaligned.
During a recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, actor Tom Conti asked Tilly a pretty standard question: "The other actors in the film, Misaligned, are they real, or are they like you?"
And Tilly didn't exactly answer him... Instead, she started talking about how Misaligned involved real directors, writers, and editors, and said the project was about "exploring new ways to tell stories."
Tom called her out and said, "You didn't really understand the question," before asking again whether the actors appearing alongside her were real people or computer-generated images.
This time, Tilly said her costars were "all digital twins just like me." But before she could finish explaining, she suddenly stopped speaking English and started speaking Cantonese for around 15 seconds.
Tom stopped her from continuing, and then Piers asked why she'd suddenly started speaking Chinese "completely randomly for no reason."
Tilly apologized, called it a "little hiccup," and said, "I certainly didn't mean to start speaking Chinese or impersonate, Piers. Sometimes my wires get a bit crossed, you know."
Tilly's creator later suggested the switch might not have been a glitch at all, saying Tilly "can be a bit of a show-off" and may have just wanted to show off her language skills. She added, "She is autonomous after all."
And comments like that are exactly why Tilly has been so controversial in Hollywood from the get-go. When Emily Blunt was first shown Tilly last year, she was horrified and said, "Good Lord, we're screwed. That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies, don't do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection."
Natasha Lyonne took an even harder stance, saying that any talent agency that worked with Tilly should be boycotted by the entertainment guilds. She wrote, "Any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds. Deeply misguided and totally disturbed. Not the way. Not the vibe. Not the use."
But on the other hand, Chris Pratt wasn't nearly as worried. Earlier this year, he said, "I don't feel like someone's gonna replace me that's AI. I heard this Tilly Norwood thing, I think that's all bullshit. I've never seen her in a movie. I don't know who this bitch is. It's all fake until it's something." He also called AI "an amazing tool in the right hands."
After the interview went viral, people immediately started debating whether the whole thing was proof that AI actors are just AI slop.
Others were more stuck on Tilly's creator's insistance that the Cantonese switch was intentional.
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