AI-generated character Tilly Norwood briefly switched from English to Chinese while answering a question from veteran British actor Tom Conti during an interview on Piers Morgan’s programme, returning to English several seconds later. The live interruption has renewed scrutiny of how AI-generated characters control language, where their training data comes from and how their commercial use affects the rights of human performers.
Tilly Norwood’s unexpected language switch
Tilly Norwood has been promoted as the “world’s first AI actor”. She was created by London-based production company Particle6 and its AI talent division, Xicoia, both operated by Dutch producer Eline van der Velden.
During the programme, Conti asked whether the other performers in Norwood’s first film were real people or synthetic characters. Norwood began answering in English, then spoke Chinese continuously for several seconds before switching back to English. She described the interruption as a “little glitch”, adding: “Sometimes my wires get crossed… it’s a bit of an unexpected twist.”
Piers Morgan Uncensored released a roughly two-minute trailer on September 18 to promote the full interview. Norwood’s social-media account did not present the incident as a technical failure. Instead, it responded with a joke, saying that if someone tries to speak more than 30 languages, the occasional display of linguistic skill is hardly surprising. The account also promoted a paid chat product that allows users to interact with Tilly Norwood.
Particle6 and Xicoia build a commercial AI character
Tilly Norwood made her debut at the Zurich Film Festival in 2025 and appeared in the film Misaligned. The film follows an artificial lifeform that gradually develops human desires under the influence of a rogue robot. The production team has described Norwood as a work of art rather than a replacement for human actors.
That description has not ended the industry dispute. After Norwood’s public debut, the US performers’ union SAG-AFTRA said she was not an actor but a computer-generated character. The union argued that the programme had been trained using a large body of work by professional performers without permission or compensation.
SAG-AFTRA represents about 160,000 actors, broadcast professionals, voice actors and stunt performers, and negotiates minimum pay and working conditions with production companies. In film and television, the commercialisation of AI characters raises questions not only about the generation of images and voices, but also about whether acting styles, likeness-related features and existing performances can be used to train models.
Performers and their union remain opposed
Van der Velden has continued to stress that Tilly Norwood is a work of art, not a substitute for a human actor. Actor Emily Blunt previously urged talent agencies to end any involvement with the project and called the AI character “terrifying”. She said that if the material was genuinely AI-generated, the film industry could be facing changes that would be difficult to avoid.
The programme and production team have not provided further clarification in the material available on whether Norwood’s switch to Chinese was a pre-programmed multilingual function, a temporary error in the generation system, or a technical issue in the editing or live-broadcast process. The interruption did, however, occur immediately after a direct question about human and synthetic performers, bringing the technology’s performance and the wider dispute over performers’ rights into the same exchange.