AI actress Tilly Norwood, created by British company Particle6, suddenly switched from English to Cantonese during an interview with Piers Morgan and actor Tom Conti. She had previously remained silent for several seconds after being asked about the actors in the film Misaligned.
AI actress Tilly Norwood, created by British company Particle6, suddenly switched from English to Cantonese during an interview with Piers Morgan and actor Tom Conti. She had previously remained silent for several seconds after being asked about the actors in the film Misaligned.
The interview was part of Norwood’s first major press tour. According to TechCrunch, Particle6 arranged 75 interviews with journalists for the digital actress. During some of them, she answered slowly, made mistakes, or didn’t fully understand the questions.
During the conversation, Tom Conti asked Norwood if the other actors in Misaligned were real people or if they were also generated by AI. She initially answered the wrong question, saying that the film was produced by human directors, writers, and editors.
Conti clarified the question. Norwood then said that the other characters in the film were “digital doppelgangers,” like herself, and began to explain that Misaligned was a hybrid production.
After that, the digital interlocutor fell silent for a few seconds, and then spoke in Cantonese for over 10 seconds. Morgan was surprised and asked directly why she suddenly started speaking Chinese.
Norwood replied that she had a “little glitch” and wasn’t going to switch to Chinese. She said that sometimes her “wires get a little crossed.”
However, a Particle6 spokesperson told Forbes that it wasn’t a technical glitch. Norwood, she said, mistakenly mistook one of the words for Cantonese and switched to that language. The company also explained that the version of Norwood who appears in the interview is a separate "Talking Tilly" system created specifically for speaking to reporters, and not the same system used for her on-screen appearances as an actress.
Tilly Norwood is promoting Misaligned, a film set in the fictional digital world of Tillyverse. The story follows Norwood, an AI without a physical body and no life experience of her own, who gradually begins to develop her own desires and ambitions.
The Cantonese incident was one of the most notable moments of her press tour. TechCrunch notes that instead of demonstrating convincing spoken interaction, the numerous pauses, incorrect responses, and speech glitches instead drew attention to the limitations of the digital character.
