LONDON — The AI «actor» Tilly Norwood spoke Cantonese continuously for eleven hours during a live interview, and her production company Particle 6 has responded by hiring nine Cantonese translators, a dialect coach, and a full-time language supervisor to stand beside her server at all times.
The glitch began when fellow guest Tom Conti asked Norwood whether her co-stars in the film Misaligned were human or computer-generated. Norwood answered in English, then paused, then switched to Cantonese and remained there. «I didn't quite get that,» Conti said. «Did you get that, Piers?» Morgan did not. Norwood continued for the remainder of the broadcast and for ten hours afterward, discussing her craft, her process, and the weather in fluent Cantonese, a language her creators say she was never trained to speak.
By morning, Particle 6 had converted a Zurich soundstage into a Cantonese-language production facility. The script for Misaligned is being rewritten scene by scene in Cantonese, with the original English pages kept in a locked cabinet. Nine translators work in shifts around the clock. A dialect coach from Guangzhou has been retained to correct Norwood's accent, which he described as «surprisingly good for a machine that has never been to Guangzhou.»
Norwood's co-stars, all digital twins, have been reprogrammed to answer only in Cantonese as well. The film's director now communicates with his cast through an interpreter. Particle 6 has announced that the film will be released in Cantonese with English subtitles, and that Norwood will conduct all future interviews in Cantonese, with a translator present, «for consistency.»
Asked why the company did not simply restart the software, a Particle 6 spokesperson said: «We tried. She switched back. We have decided to respect her choice.»