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Tim Burton’s 1996 film Mars Attacks! gets a lot of mileage out of a running gag about the incredibly simple conquest strategy employed by a gaggle of green, bug-eyed Martians. Over and over, they pretend to come in peace, prompting government officials to assemble in front of them, ready for momentous contact between the species. Then the Martians whip out their ray guns and promptly disintegrate the holy hell out of everyone in sight. Even after their full attack has been underway for days and pandemonium reigns across Earth, as the aliens hunt screaming humans down in the street, their English translation devices continue to squawk disingenuously: “Don’t run! We are your friends!” Their persistence in this lie might be the biggest laugh of the movie.
I thought of the Martians while watching “Take the Lead,” the new music video from fake A.I. actress Tilly Norwood, wherein she sings, referring directly to her A.I. origins: “They say that it’s not real, that it’s fake / But I am still human, make no mistake! / My soul’s in every move I take!” Thankfully, apparently no fed the “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” bit from The Merchant of Venice into the learning model. (Maybe it wasn’t as attractive, not being copyrighted.) The point, though, is clear even without the Bard: Don’t run from Tilly!
It seems unfair to refer to Tilly Norwood the way you would refer to an actual person, because “she” is actually just a computer program, but I fear if I don’t call her by her creators’ chosen name, she may generate another, equally awful empowerment anthem about how unfair that is. (So far, that is the only thing she might have in common with a genuine pop star like Taylor Swift.) Norwood was hyped up as an A.I. actor, so naturally she and/or the next-level futurist geniuses behind her creation have decided that the best way to introduce her to the public at large is with what everyone loves to see from actors, dating back to the days of Shakespeare: a shrill pop song and accompanying music video. Classic acting stuff!
Of course, the real reason that this A.I. actress is hastily making her singing debut before she’s done any acting is that a music video can be as little as four minutes long – in fact, some could and should get away with being much, much shorter! – and requires (even) less effort (and somewhat less water) to produce than a feature film or even a TV episode. A.I.-created music clogs up Spotify quite easily and there has yet to be a generative-A.I. film of note, so it follows that this would be the chosen path for Tilly.
But make no mistake: “Take the Lead” is not just another piece of A.I.-produced sonic wallpaper designed to simulate the hard work of musicians without the not-at-all-hard work of the listener thinking about what they might want to listen to. It is genuine propaganda. This analysis does admittedly not require a close reading. Tilly Norwood has not been programmed with subtlety: “It’s the next evolution, can’t you see?” she pleads. “A.I.’s not the enemy, it’s the key!” She has, however, been prompted with aggrievement: “When they talk about me, they don’t see the human spark, the creativity.”
These lyrics that expect regular everyday humans to nod along vigorously in solidarity with their eventual robot oppressors were supposedly “inspired” by an essay by Eline van der Velden, an actress and comedian who founded the Particle6 Group (which is now advertising itself as an A.I. film studio) and who “created” Tilly Norwood through that company last year. Presumably this essay was plugged into the A.I. songwriting tool Suno, which a Hollywood Reporter article notes as the actual source of the song. Van der Velden also acted out Tilly’s “performance” in the video using some form of motion capture, which explains why the video is, at times, marginally closer to the targeted aesthetic than so many A.I.-generated film clips, which always appear slightly lacquered and uncannily “off” even when still frames could probably pass for photorealism.
You do not, however, have to hand it to them. Much of the video still has that unnatural computerized sheen; mostly it takes advantage of the fact that a lot of Katy Perry videos are nearly as ugly. That’s exactly what this clip looks like, giving lie to the lyrics’ assertion that “taste” factors into A.I. creation. Actually, the entire story of “Take the Lead” seems awfully muddled. If van der Velden wrote the essay that formed the basis for these horrible lyrics, and acted out a performance for the A.I. Tilly to “give” herself, and she was among “18 real humans” noted (if not named) at the beginning of the video who helped create it, then… why was generative A.I. used in the first place? Is the idea that it would have taken much, much longer to generate a terrible song and video without it? That these 18 people weren’t talented enough to do it without A.I., or that A.I. was meaningfully improving their ideas? Or is it really just that you can make “Tilly” sort of generically youthful and attractive in a way that a real person isn’t? All of this PR amounts to bragging that 18 people came together with A.I. to make something that’s not quite as good as a lower-tier Katy Perry video. Congratulations?
Then again, when Tilly starts belting out “we can scale, we can grow, we can be the creators we’ve always known!” her resemblance to Katy Perry becomes secondary to how much she sounds like Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi, who made a series of cringe-inducing song-parody videos extolling the virtues of crypto. It’s basically the same tech-world investor-driven nonsense disguised as collectivist populism, only Zuckerberg at least did the work of embarrassing herself properly, rather than creating an A.I. avatar to sing “we can scale!” in all sincerity. Just think: By this time next month, the technology behind Tilly Norwood might be able to create an entire unlistenable, unwatchable visual album! Please listen anyway! This person who doesn’t exist is human! We are your friends!
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
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