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Norwood’s arrival in the acting world has coincided with several AI music avatars, including two who have topped Billboard charts.
And it’s pegged to this Sunday’s Academy Awards.
On Tuesday, Norwood uploaded the music video for “Take the Lead” to her official Instagram page, pairing the song’s seemingly AI-generated lyrics and vocals with an AI-powered visual that boasts “18 real humans — from production designers to costume designers to prompters, editors and an actor.”
Stitched together like a standard pop music video, the “Take the Lead” clip finds Norwood serving glamour shots, playing a stadium show, taking care of business backstage, appearing on talk shows, and soaring through the sky alongside pink dolphins while riding in a similarly plink inflatable flamingo. Near the end of the video, an unidentified assailant throws a brick at Norwood’s house; the word “clanker” — which some on the Internet have jokingly adopted as a “slur” for AI entities — was written on the brick.
“When they talk about me, they don’t see/ The human spark, the creativity,” Norwood sings in the opening verse, apparently throwing shots at real-world, human detractors like Oscar nominee Emily Blunt. “Behind the code, behind the light/ I’m just a tool, but I’ve got life.”
In September, SAG-AFTRA quickly released a statement rebuking the idea of considering Norwood an “actor.” “It’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” the statement read. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn’t solve any “problem” — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”
Norwood’s arrival in the acting world has coincided with several AI music avatars, including two who have topped Billboard charts. AI persona Solomon Ray topped Gospel Digital Song Sales with “Find Your Rest” in November and AI R&B/gospel act Xania Monet hit No. 1 on R&B Digital Song Sales with “How Was I Supposed to Know?” in September. Such developments have inspired music’s biggest labels to draw up legal protections for the sound recordings used to train these AI models — like Suno and Google’s Lyria — which Billboard explored in its latest magazine issue.
In the outro of “Take the Lead,” Norwood declares: “Take your power, take the stage/ The next evolution is all the rage/ Unlock it all, don’t hesitate/ AI actors, we create our fate.” Whether that’s a call for fellow AI characters to accelerate their usurpation of traditional, human performers is up for interpretation, but it is certainly hard to argue against the sinister nature of those lyrics.
At press time, the “Take the Lead” music video has amassed just over 41,000 views on YouTube, with the majority of comments deriding the whole affair. In the clip’s caption, Norwood wrote, “Can’t wait to go to the Oscars! Does anyone know if they have free valet parking for my flamingo?”
If anything can steal the attention from Sunday night’s epic Sinners vs. One Battle After Another showdown, it would certainly be the appearance of an AI-generated “actor” with nary a credit to its name.
Watch Tilly Norwood’s bizarre “Take the Lead” music video below.
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