I have no mouth and I must puke

Tilly’s Punctured AI!

I don’t want to go on about this for long because not only am I angry and drunk, I’ve also taken my blood pressure meds, so instead of flaring grandly into a Heraclitean fire my rage will simply hit an iron dome of receptor blockers and sputter out — as may I, eventually, it’s only a matter of time. So I will try to keep this one at a low boil long enough to reach the point.

I’ve written here about AI many times. Sometimes the spur has been a specific event, like rightwingers trying to get an AI chatbot to say the n-word and blaming wokeness when it won’t. (Also related: A July 2025 fantasia in which Elon Musk tries to get Grok to advocate for a war with Iran on behalf of some neocons and gets in response some racism that he wasn’t looking for.)

Sometimes it’s about a specific benefit advertised for AI that I know is a hoax. One was inspired by an article about “the AI ourbouros” — that is, the self-reinforcing market mania for companies like NVIDIA and Antropic that are allegedly keeping our stock market, indeed our economy, afloat, but which is obviously so insubstantial and purposeless at bottom that its widening gyre can only end in disaster. (Really, has anyone proposed an off-ramp for that insanity? No, because no one wants to admit such a thing is needed until they’ve extracted every filthy dollar out of the impending catastrophe.)

Sometimes it’s about the poignant and horrifying situations whereby people suffering from deep emotional wounds accept in desperation the “help” offered by AI shysters — like the bizarre interview Jim Acosta did with an AI rendering of a long-dead victim of a school shooting as if the kid had actually been allowed to grow up in some alternate universe; or the nightmarish 2wai commercial showing how you could create an AI avatar of your dead loved ones and have “them” “talk” to you and your succeeding generations for decades, perhaps centuries to come. (I reacted then: “I felt like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now when he saw the pile of arms — ‘I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do’ — I felt like the Monster at the end of The Bride of Frankenstein...” I must add, I have just been looking at Oscar-nominated short films as part of my Academy Awards prediction duty, and just saw All The Empty Rooms, about a journalist’s visits to the preserved bedrooms of young victims of school shootings, or rather I saw half of it because I had to turn it off because I couldn’t stop crying, and when it comes to this shit I am in just no goddamn mood.)

Often they are about AI’s philosophical and moral implications — like when I talked about AI as the plagiarism machine it is well-known to be, and how (beyond the theft of intellectual property in a world where such property is already held fatally cheap) it is more than just a crime against individual aggrieved artists, it is also a crime against humanity, or at least against the human spirit (though history suggests humanity will be the next domino to fall).

And I’ve talked about the very specific role AI plays in the aesthetics of fascism — how the brute force of its rendering engines creates an ultra-reality that is more detailed than reality and may thus convince some poor souls that it’s the same thing as art, though it is really not only foreign but also hostile to the purpose of art and the values that make us human.

I could go on — I would also recommend my favorite on the theme, “The Gut-Wringing Machine” — but before I faint I have to get to the news hook: AI “artist” Tilly Norwood, and her new video.

You may have heard of this entirely synthetic actress/singer/model “created by Xicoia, which was founded in February 2025 as the artificial intelligence (AI) division of Particle6, a production company founded by Dutch actress and producer Eline Van der Velden in 2015.” Norwood is intended “to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,” Van der Velden has said, though I’m sure the AI on her computer has since updated and swapped in some younger models, and Norwood has appeared in some poorly-received AI slop demonstration material.

You may have noticed that human beings are getting pretty sick of AI shit being pushed at them — so much so that the big-brains who hope to get hyper-rich off it are retrenching, making a show of backing off some of their more obnoxiously aggressive incursions, at least for the moment (“Microsoft’s backing off on its ‘AI everywhere’ plan,” “Companies Are Quietly Rehiring the Workers They Replaced With AI,” etc.).

But that’s just one tactic in a sub-strategy of a scheme to enslave mankind. Another involves an appeal to emotion — trying to get you to feel bad about the poor AI that you’ve been so mean to, when it only wants to help and serve you.

To that end a video of Tilly Norwood has been put out (the passive voice is perfectly appropriate for this enterprise as no authors are proud enough to claim credit) in which she stands on a riverfront dotted with landmarks recognizable from several world cities. The falseness of the setting is obvious; they are no longer pretending their avatars perform in real places that just happen to look like geographical mash-ups, but rather encourage you to accept this fakeberg is as real as the metropoli in which humans have gathered and made lives and culture for centuries because more and more of your entertainment product will be delivered from this fuzzy simulacrum and it has lots of city-like features which our surveys show you morons like and anyway it would be futile to resist.

In the video you can see, or imagine you see, in Tilly’s quantified-to-be-pretty face some algorithmically-arrived-at expressions of sorrow. In a vibrato modulated to resemble that of several popular singers you’ve heard on the public address system at your local CVS, she sings:

When they talk about me, they don’t see
The human spark, the creativity
Behind the code, behind the light
I’m just a tool, but I’ve got life
I didn’t come from nowhere, no…

I may have missed some details thereafter, because that’s when I started screaming and smashing furniture, and when my wife came to ask what was wrong I shut the door in her face and locked it and did heroin. But here’s the piece of shit — judge for yourself, while you still have the capacity to do so.

You saw Sinners, right? When those poor hillbillies said they just wanted to join and jam with the natives in “fellowship” and later sucked their blood and made them undead? Same thing.