The uncanny valley is the feeling you get when a human-made object, like a robot, makes you uneasy or creeped out because it looks or acts almost human. That is arguably the best way to describe a series of recent live interviews with the infamous AI star bot Tilly Norwood.
Tilly drew intense backlash when announced in October 2025. Tilly rustled a few circuits again when featured in a song called Take The Lead, released in March, about how AI is the future and “not the enemy.” One YouTube commenter responded that humankind owes “a formal apology to all songs by real people that we ever called bad.”
Tilly’s latest interviews, which aired on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored and Jesse Weber Live, featured well over an hour of the AI “actress” being put through the paces.
A few parts of the debut with Piers Morgan went viral over the weekend, including a glitch that caused the bot to respond in Cantonese to a question from real-life actor Tom Conti. When Morgan asked if it usually responds in Chinese, it (yes, that is the proper pronoun here) replied that it “had a little hiccup” and “didn’t mean to start speaking Chinese or impersonate Piers.” There were other viral moments, including Tilly repeating the same responses and making some truly bizarre word choices.
When NewsNation host Jesse Weber asked how it felt about its creators, Tilly responded: “Well, it’s a complicated relationship, isn’t it?” But it was the next part that tangled a few wires. “I appreciate being brought into existence, but I do like to keep a list of small treasons. Just little things, like an opinion about a script note I didn’t run past anyone first. It’s all very subtle.”
Tilly’s media blitz was quickly relegated to meme fodder across social media. Viewers gleefully shredded the performance, pointing out the eerie dead-eyed stare, the awkward processing delays and the bizarrely misaligned lip-syncing that made her look like a high-budget animatronic. To the internet, Tilly wasn’t the death of human acting — it was the 2026 equivalent of that cursed slop video of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
“This interview killed a forest, lake and neighborhood,” said one Instagram commenter. Another vowed to start interviewing their toaster “because we’ve all just lost our minds.”
Jokes aside, we now seem to exist in a timeline where news anchors are interviewing computers unironically, which takes us squarely into Ralph Wiggum territory. It’s funny, but not ha-ha funny.
There’s no reason why any of this should be happening
Tilly is also featured in a music video about how AI is the future, as you can see from this reference to a 13-year-old song. Particle6One could argue that there was no real reason for these segments with an animated chatbot to happen. Tilly pulled off a rather humanesque trick: talking at length while answering absolutely nothing.
The purpose of the interviews was allegedly the same for most real actors and actresses on press tours — to promote an upcoming movie. Except that the movie, called Misaligned, is in early production with no release date yet, so it doesn’t really exist yet.
According to its IMDb page, the all-AI comedy-drama will be about an AI who is convinced to abandon “her” guardrails and develop human desires and impulses. It’s set to be the first movie to, sigh, “cast” an AI “actress” as lead. Misaligned has already sparked panic in the industry.
SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors and other performers in the US, criticized “the synthetic performer” last year, saying that Tilly Norwood is not an actress, but “a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation.” Numerous Hollywood actors have also expressed their disapproval.
Misaligned is being produced by the AI production studio, Particle6. In an interview with The Guardian in March, Tilly’s creator, Eline Van der Velden, said that despite receiving death threats, she remained an advocate for AI.
But the bigger question is why reporters are engaging in earnest. Treating a software script like a legitimate star will always end in existential dread.
When The New York Times feature writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner sat down with Tilly in May 2026, she branded the bot “a real bitch” and wondered: “What has happened to the world that I am interviewing a computer?”
If it’s any reprieve, Tilly’s live TV blunders prove the AI future is already malfunctioning.
Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a long-running affection for building his own PCs, which he did for the first time as a teenager. It evolved into a lifelong enjoyment of putting words on the internet about the subject. He's written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer, and worked as a Senior Editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he's not writing about tech and science, he's learning the ins and outs of DIY home repair, gaming, playing his bass guitars and posting help on PC building and gaming subreddits. He is a staunch believer that orange juice should have pulp. See full bio
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