Particle 6 is opening its AI performer Tilly Norwood to live public conversation from 16 to 19 September
AI production company Particle 6 is making “AI actor” Tilly Norwood available for anyone to talk to for a limited period of time.
From midday tomorrow (Wednesday 16 September) to 8am on Sunday (19 September), it will possible to have a live interview with Tilly Norwood here.
Particle 6 says that you can “ask her anything, make her laugh or even disagree with her - there’s no script and no pre-written answers. Just don’t expect much success if you try to drag her into politics, explicit conversations or intrusive questions about her private life”.
The company adds that it’s “always fun to ask her what she thinks about you – she can guess your age and what you do, roast your outfit, or even tell your fortune.”
The Particle 6 live experiment is designed to explore what happens when an AI performer becomes interactive at scale, and how AI can be used for different entertainment purposes.
The interviewable version of Tilly was built with a foundation of publicly available third-party AI tools. She has been developed by a team of writers, technologists and character specialists who have spent eight months creating essentially an AI assistant with what the company believes is “a unique personality with her own voice, memories, humour, knowledge, conversational style, understanding of the world and carefully developed boundaries”.
Insight: A large language model powers Tilly Norwood’s mind, governed by a 12-page system prompt that defines her personality, humour, and boundaries; a knowledge base of up to 30 documents covering her world, her work, and her views; and a set of carefully constructed guardrails. A neural voice engine gives her a natural speaking voice, while a real-time video layer renders her on screen, trained on Particle 6’s own reference footage. The three systems communicate continuously, turning speech into understanding, understanding into response, and response into a living, speaking performance, with roughly two seconds of latency.
Eline van der Velden, founder and CEO of Particle 6, says: “By launching a version of Tilly Norwood that can handle live conversations, we are once again investing in a fun way to demonstrate where AI technology is at and what it can achieve right here, right now. However, as with the filmed content we have made with Tilly acting, getting to this stage has not been possible with a single prompt and the press of a button. A dedicated team has been hard at work since January this year, building Tilly’s brain, layer by layer, prompt by prompt and carefully feeding her information.
“A vital part of this work has been creating Tilly’s personality so that she always replies in a uniquely Tilly way. How she responds to questions - her main system prompt - is something that has been constantly tested and tweaked for many months…and it has been far from easy to get this new tech working in the way we wanted. We’ve also had to build her knowledge base, deciding what she should know and which topics were out of bounds, and put guardrails in place to ensure safe conversations. This constant experimentation, testing and iteration has proved a long and complicated process. But that’s how innovation happens. And when we use AI to innovate like this, we are also creating new jobs.
“We’ve always believed that AI shouldn’t just be watched - it should be experienced as a new entertainment form. At Particle 6 we are all about artistic exploration and experimentation with AI. So, we are excited to finally see how people interact with Tilly and just where these conversations with her might take us.”
Everyone chatting to Tilly gets two minutes free and then has to choose 15- or 30-minute sessions, charged at £13 and £22 respectively. Particle 6 says that at the end of the experiment, all profits will be donated to charity.
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