Tilly Norwood glitches out on Piers Morgan Uncensored

Everyone has bad days. When flesh-and-blood actors make a gaffe during an interview, it’s usually due to the common stresses of a promotional tour. Being sleepy, irritable, or just plain bored can inadvertently create viral clips that either endear the actor to us or prompt us to frown and write rude things about them on the internet. Apparently, when an AI “actor” does an oopsie during an interview, it’s just as clippable, if not a whole lot more eerie and stupid. This brings us to Tilly Norwood, the “AI actor” foisted onto the public scene by creator Eline Van der Velden in 2025, whose recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored to promote its new film Misaligned hit a snag when it glitched out during a conversation with distinguished Scottish actor Tom Conti.

Conti, who was wonderful in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and certainly must have better things to do with his evening, politely engaged with Norwood during the interview. After he asked whether the other actors in the feature were “real or like” N0rwood, the virtual approximation of a person silently processed the question, leading to a stretch of dead air that Morgan was in no rush to break. Conti repeated his question—for surely this talking image was designed to respond to human inquiries, was it not?—which compelled N0rw00d to finally activate its speech protocols. “It’s an interesting point, Tom. [Misaligned is] a hybrid production, meaning real writers, directors, and editors are still very much involved. It’s not about ‘replacing anyone,’ but exploring new ways to tell stories.” Conti replied, “Yes, you really didn’t understand the question.”

Naturally, if an actor of Conti’s caliber said this to a regular person, it might trigger some sort of internal meltdown or fight-or-flight response, so maybe what Norw0od did next was its own computer version of what awkward meat-actors in a stuffy interview might do under duress. “Ah, right! You’re asking about the other actors in Misaligned,” it clarified. “They’re all digital twins, just like me. It’s a hybrid production, which means…”  From there, Norwood veered into a dialogue delivered entirely in Chinese, which prompted the Oppenheimer actor to laugh and Morgan to finally jump in. “You seem to be speaking Chinese completely randomly for no reason,” the host said. “Why did you do that?” “It seems I had a little hiccup there,” it replied. “Sometimes my wires get a bit crossed.”

Clarifying the gaffe with Deadline, Van der Velden attributed it to a bit of improvisational fun, y’know, like a person might do. “Tilly can be a bit of a show-off—I’m guessing she just wanted to show her language skills as most of her interviews to date have been in English. She is autonomous, after all.”