It won’t bag “her” any awards, but the AI “actor” Till Norwood just put in the performance of a lifetime.

In an interview — also deserving of scare quotes, but we’re trying to show some restraint here — with British political commentator Piers Morgan, the smiling AI persona, with her uncanny gaze permanently fixed at some indeterminate point that’s somewhere not quite the center of the camera, appeared to severely glitch out before suddenly ranting in Chinese.

When Morgan’s human guest, the actor Tom Conti, asks if the other actors in Norwood’s films are real or AI, the AI didn’t seem to understand his question and gave a hard-to-follow answer. Conti’s poses the question again, and gets an unexpected response.

“They’re all digital twins, just like me,” Norwood began to explain. “It’s a hybrid production which means…” She stops, still smiling. Then, without missing a beat, proceeds to start rambling in Mandarin. Both Morgan and Conti look baffled, and the AI keeps blustering before it’s finally cut off.

“You seem to be speaking Chinese completely randomly for no reason. Why did you do that?” Morgan asks.

“Oh, my apologies, it seems I had a little hiccup there,” Norwood replies, adding that sometimes her “wires get crossed.” 

Morgan presses. “How often do you start talking in Chinese when you’re talking to two English people?” (Conti is Scottish.)

“Honestly not often at all, that was a bit of a curveball, even for me,” the AI says.

What an enlightening exchange.

Norwood — or should we say the company behind it, Particle 6 Productions — has been on something of a media blitz lately. Last week, CNN released an interview it did with the AI creation, which was widely derided as a puff piece. (NBC, CBS, and Sky News followed up with softball interviews of their own.)

Unexpectedly launching into a rant into a different language is far from its only gaffe, but it’s probably Norwood’s most embarrassing. Still, in an interview with Wired, Norwood did have the temerity to assert that AI-generated movies are good for the environment. She also countered that “all lives matter” — a slogan used by the right to dismiss systemic safety issues faced by minorities — when asked if Black lives do.

If this is the future of Hollywood, it’s reassuring to know that the press junket faux pas isn’t going away, at least.

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