Posted on 11/15/2025 8:57:24 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The British actress Tilly Norwood began appearing in viral videos and short films across the internet earlier this year. She is young, fresh-faced, with girl-next-door vibes. She will be signed by a major talent agency soon. But Tilly Norwood is not real. She is an artificial-intelligence synthetic. She is not in the real world, not embodied. She is not a person or an actress. She is a digital Frankenstein’s monster of video software and ChatGPT. Tilly was created by Particle6 Productions, an AI studio founded by Dutch comedian and actress Eline Van der Velden. Tilly is her project. Van der Velden moved to the UK when she was 14 to study drama and musical theater – and Tilly is fairly clearly her idealized self. Tilly, and by extension Van der Velden, is increasingly famous.
Tilly represents an inflection point for the entertainment industry. The buzz and controversy around her feels like a marketing ploy by Particle6 Productions, part of a rollout or testing process in which the public’s willingness to accept AI replacements for actors is being measured and analyzed. Traditional executives and agents must be watching closely.
If Tilly fails, there will be other Tillys and other AI studios that will attempt to succeed where she didn’t. Studios and agencies have every incentive to replace expensive human capital, expensive human stars, with comparatively cheap simulacra. Her creators say she can reduce production costs by 90 percent. And the technology that makes Tillys will only get cheaper.
Human replacement is already happening in other artistic industries. Spotify recently announced it will be working with major studios to develop AI music. It is already sucking streams away from real musicians.
But the visceral shock from AI simulation will be even greater in film than in music, as we both see and hear these creations. Van der Velden has compared Tilly to the use of CGI. That leaves us movie-goers in a position where we must delineate the line between CGI – which is widely acceptable as ethical – and the Tillys of the world. We know that Robert Downey Jr. isn’t really doing all the things Iron Man does, but we don’t mind – at least not morally. But to imagine Tilly integrated in a live-action movie the same way that CGI is provokes a disturbed response.
This discomfort is not irrational. If AI becomes able to convincingly capture the full range of human expression – if it becomes indistinguishable from actors on film – then we will have arrived at a dangerous place. First, because the consequences for actors are existential. Second, because our collective sense of reality will be at risk. We may come to prefer the artificial to the real. The age of apps has taught us that humans can easily fall prey to this temptation. We like the frictionless, easy options offered by apps and we ignore their trade-offs: heightened isolation, digital addiction, coarsened social bonds. Apps – by reducing opportunity costs and by creating sanitized digital pathways for real experience – have made dating, eating and communicating worse. People will swipe incessantly on Hinge rather than date, order delivery rather than cook or go out and text rather than talk. Simulated actors pose the same risk.
And they’re worse, too. AI can only re-present us with what we’ve already made. Tilly can only predict what an actor – in her case, a British female millennial actor – might do, how they might act. It is pure pastiche, recursion. To become accustomed to this, to want this, is to lose taste for the unpredictable, the strange, the uncanny, the circumstantial and accidental things that happen on set when great actors, writers and directors collaborate: an unscripted moment of hesitation, a look that wasn’t in the script, the way weather or location affects a scene. We will lose our taste for the subtler nuances of light and sound and embodied human acting.
Will we also lose our taste for human behavior?
Even before the intrusion of AI, digital streaming content had become predictable and stupid. This content will be derivative of this derivative slop. When we use the word slop, this is what we’re referring to – recursive, median, flavorless products. To have a taste for slop is to have no taste at all.
Outrage and statements from Hollywood actors and producers will not be enough to stop Tilly’s rise. The economic incentives for media and AI companies to push this slop are too high, and there are very few checks in place that could possibly work.
There’s no free-market solution, but there is a free-spirit solution. The only real hope lies in consumers, viewers, tastemakers. The only rational response to the rise of Tilly Norwoods is for filmmakers and the studios that still wish to produce great movies to double down on analog methods, and for actors to spend more time in the theater.
Those of us who produce televisual media must redouble our efforts to provide consumers a meaningful alternative to AI streaming slop. We will have to give audiences the reason to prefer human experience over AI falsehoods.
Can’t wait for the big AI comebacks of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, taking on gang bangers in the ’hood . . .
Elvis is Back!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w11NwI1nPs8
I have no interest in cartoon people...which is all they are.
I’d rather watch an AI actor than knowingly contribute to the wealth of one of the thousands of scumbags like Robert DeNiro.
At least we would know it’s fake, in the cases I mentioned. Other “Tilly Norwoods” may be passed off as real in the future.
Hey; no Elvis as Han Solo?
This was thought about for at least 20 years. The cgi “actors” were termed “synthespians”
But when I think about it ....what are “real” actors. They are people who can pretend they are something they are not. Their movements are captured either on light sensitive films or electronic sensors. We have to suspend belief that we are watching reality. Same with cartoons. We watch those old hand drawn ones...now they are drawn using computers.
What AI actors do is force the viewer to realize they are watching a phony representation of reality. The viewers connect with real actors emotionally, but those actors are just as fake as the AI actors...in the end, it is the viewer who needs an emotional connection to something. Something a “real” person used to bring them. Now it’s gone and actors and viewers have to find something else to do or connect with in their lives.
well most action scenes are all AI generated these days, so whats wrong with actors as well?
Morally repulsive? I can’t wait for AI actors. Real ones are more often than not arrogant, ignorant, blow hards half of whom never finished high school. But for playing make believe in front of a camera, most of them would go back to being waitresses and garbage men instead of making tens of millions of dollars and then spouting off about whatever the latest Leftist fad is. Those jobs are all most of them are qualified for.
Fewer leftists being enriched and made famous/influential is a wonderful thing.
“Can’t wait for the big AI comebacks of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, taking on gang bangers in the ’hood . . “
I’m hoping for the Three Stooges comeback. More Curley Classics...
I've noticed in the last 6 months or so my recommends on Youtube have been flooded with various WWII accounts/documentaries that are completely fake. Things that never happened. They always have the same theme "the Germans/Japanese were shocked when......then insert some thing about what the Americans had or did that was super duper surprising, wonderful, blah blah blah. Eg one of them claimed there was some "trick" that enabled P-38 lightnings to out dog fight Zeroes. No there wasn't. No such thing ever happened. Any P-38 lightning that ever tried to dog fight with a Zero lost and lost badly. "WW2 Tales" is one such source of this fiction but there are others. You can tell its all AI generated fiction.
I was asked last week by a producer to be interviewed about de Tocqueville’s trip thru the US in 1831. I replied that I knew NOTHING about de Tocqueville and I could give minimal information about a person he had conversations with. I only knew that person as peripheral to my research subject.
The reply to my reply asked if I could tell her what the person who met with de Tocqueville WOULD have said and describe what their conversation MAY have been like.
I replied to THAT with the research archives containing the papers of both men and suggesting that they assign a gopher to physically go to the archives and bring back xeroxes of the real documents of their thoughts at the time.
Asking me was more legitimate than finding out what really happened????? Producers REALLY don’t care about truth if someone else will write the dialog for them?????
I’m still having trouble believing that interchange actually happened. This has truly been a silly season.
“ If she is silent on politics isn’t that a big improvement?”
Yeah. My thought was it couldn’t happen to a better profession.
have been flooded with various WWII accounts/documentaries that are completely fake.
Yes! They can even be entertaining...I’ve watched a couple. They take a kernel of factoid and turn it into a 30 minute video.
But I am concerned about people who know little of those events being completely sold on it as being “history”.
I might agree if the actors weren’t morally repulsive. But they are, so I don’t care. They might be see more sympathy about their plight if they weren’t such entitled mouthy jerks, but...
Movies aren’t real. Human actors playing a role. I know it is not real but fun to watch. I don’t see the problem
Wait till AI characters start copping an attitude.
“Morally”?
But replacing millions of people in jobs now done by AI is moral? Funny that, those benighted, overpaid shills for the left are selective, aren’t they?
There are already AI actors out there and people do emotionally attach to them. Of kid just committed suicide over one.
Now if they could replace politicians with AI.
Would anyone know the difference?
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