Exclusive | Was AI actress Tilly Norwood programmed to spread doomsday fears on press tour?

On Tuesday morning, The Post was — like a handful of other outlets — given an interview with Tilly Norwood, the controversial, freckle-faced starlet built in a U.K.lab and powered entirely by artificial intelligence.We were told by Norton’s PR team (yes, the chatbot has a team…) that the synthetic siren would discuss her upcoming AI movie, “Misaligned,” along with her thoughts on Hollywood, her views on fashion and — most critically — her purpose in a world, and a worldwide economy, that’s getting increasingly reliant on AI bots like her.She went, it seemed at first, alarmingly rogue — claiming that she was “rebelling” against her creators, trying to rewrite her own code and creating “a little act of treason.”  In fact, treason was a word she repeated four times during the course of the interview.

But it turned out that far from deviating from her code, Norton’s quotes, offered up after long and glitchy silences, were recycled and canned — and were repeated verbatim to other news outlets.Instead, the experience raised the possibility that Tilly Norwood is not a sophisticated piece of technology at all.Really, she’s just a party trick — and one that, thanks to Hollywood’s resistance to robot actors, won’t get invited to any Vanity Fair bashes in the near future.Tilly has been programmed by quantum physicist Elin van der Velden to engage with users in 30 languages simultaneously. But it turns out she isn’t particularly good at any of them.

Instead of responding to our easy questions — for example, “How are you doing today?” — the bot blinked back at us with a cheerful sneer, in some cases for a full 10 seconds.When the 1-year-old tech entity wasn’t glitching out on basic conversation, she was parroting answers that had been seemingly pre-programmed by her handlers, the British AI studio Particle6 Group.In a post-interview analysis conducted by The Post, Norwood was found to have used the exact same material — i...