Hollywood’s AI Nightmare Just Dropped the Worst Song of All Time

When Particle6 first introduced Tilly Norwood, their AI-generated “actor,” last fall, the entertainment world recoiled in collective horror. Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt summed up the industry’s sentiment perfectly: “Good Lord, we’re screwed… Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop.”

But Particle6 didn’t stop. They doubled down—and the result is a musical abomination that makes AI-generated pop sound like a crime against humanity.

“Take the Lead”: A Song That Should Have Never Existed

The company just released a music video for Norwood’s debut single, “Take the Lead,” and I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it’s the worst song I’ve ever heard. This isn’t clickbait or hyperbole—it’s an honest assessment of a track so profoundly misguided it makes you question the entire concept of artistic creation.

I was prepared for something mediocre. After all, we’ve seen AI-generated music make waves before. Remember Xania Monet’s “How Was I Supposed to Know?” That AI-generated track actually charted on Billboard’s R&B charts, and while I personally prefer music that could exist without tools like Suno, at least it had some basic musical competence.

Tilly Norwood’s offering? It’s in a league of its own—the kind of song that makes you physically uncomfortable.

Eighteen People, One Disaster

Here’s the most baffling part: eighteen people contributed to this three-minute catastrophe. We’re talking designers, prompters, editors, and who knows what else. Eighteen professionals, presumably paid real money, worked on a song about the unique struggles of being an AI character that critics underestimate because they think she’s not human.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The Lyrics That Make No Sense

The song opens with Norwood snarling at the camera: “They say it’s not real, that it’s fake… But I am still human, make no mistake.”

That is, to put it gently, not true.

Music doesn’t need to be universally relatable, but it should probably be relatable to someone. What’s genuinely impressive here is that Particle6 managed to create a song about something that literally no human will ever experience. No person can connect with the feeling of being disregarded for being an AI because—and this is important—no person is an AI.

The track sounds like a bargain-bin Sara Bareilles rip-off, opening with lines like “When they talk about me, they don’t see/The human spark, the creativity.” Norwood then affirms, “I’m not a puppet, I’m the star,” before launching into a chorus that’s supposed to be inspirational but lands somewhere between cringe and comedy:

Actors, it’s time to take the lead
Create the future, plant the seed
Don’t be left out, don’t fall behind
Build your own, and you’ll be free
We can scale, we can grow
Be the creators we’ve always known
It’s the next evolution, can’t you see?
AI’s not the enemy, it’s the key

A Stadium of Fake People

The video shows Norwood strutting through a data center hallway—perhaps the only honest moment in the entire production—before transitioning to a stage where she performs for a stadium full of cheering fake people. It’s supposed to be a triumphant moment, but it feels more like watching someone’s delusions of grandeur play out in real-time.

The outro removes any doubt about who this song is for:

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

We Don’t Need This

We do not need music from an AI persona addressing other AI personas with a hopeful anthem about working together to prove judgmental humans wrong. We just don’t.

The Pitchfork Connection

Twenty years ago, Pitchfork gave Jet’s album “Shine On” a 0.0 out of 10—not because it was offensive, but because it was so derivative and uninspired that they embedded a YouTube video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth instead of writing a review.

Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef later explained that the site’s writers were angry about mainstream rock becoming “knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed.” These are the exact complaints artists have today about AI-generated works—they ring hollow and simply reproduce the work of artists past.

SAG-AFTRA put it bluntly last fall: “Tilly Norwood is not 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… 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.”

While Jet was taking inspiration from older rock groups to make its derivative music, Tilly Norwood is literally derived from AI models that could not exist without training data taken from artists without their consent.

The Verdict

I think Pitchfork jumped the gun. Twenty years later, they finally have a worthy subject.

Tags: AI music, Tilly Norwood, Particle6, worst song ever, AI actor, Hollywood AI, synthetic performer, SAG-AFTRA, Suno, Xania Monet, music industry AI, digital persona, cringe content, tech horror story

Viral phrases: “Good Lord, we’re screwed,” “eighteen people worked on this disaster,” “the worst song I’ve ever heard,” “AI’s not the enemy, it’s the key,” “a stadium of fake people,” “monkey peeing into its own mouth,” “knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed,” “stolen performances,” “devaluing human artistry,” “next evolution is all the rage”

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