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.
AI is much better than leftist actors.
I have zero sympathy for them.
AI can create videos of alleged war zones, designed to influence public opinion. And the list goes on....
There are many YouTube videos being created by AI. If not for the absurdity of the subject, you can’t tell that it was actually created by AI.
So the “casting couch” will soon end up on the curb?
At least the pedos, commies, and freaks will always have their Shakespeare in the park. They just won’t be getting all that money.
Tilly ain’t fat or black or both so I don’t see much work in her future.
Maybe we can get AI politicians.
A brave new world!
But, NOT GUILTY!!
Exactly. Hollyweird is a cesspit.
Morally, this is no different than a cartoon.
You have characters that tell a story. Does it matter if they’re real?
Our movie industry is still a very new concept, especially “movie stars” that make a gazillion dollars making one, only possible with modern technology. Historically, actors had to constantly perform plays live to make a living, e.g. a daily job, just like everyone else.
I’m no fan of “movie stars” - with their heightened and inflated influence on the world, as though they’re some sort of super-human with some innate wisdom that they must impose on everyone. Most are narcissistic scumbags.
Why is she morally repulsive?
What do morals have to do with it?
Hollywood and its current participants can’t put this genie back into the bottle. On the bright side, we won’t have to endure the pontificating of pea-brained but famous morons. We’ll also probably see new films by formerly famous, but departed actors.
To hell with actors. We're better off without them.
To hell with actors. We’re better off without them.
Entertainers and court jesters used to be the lowest-end of society. It’s time to get back to that.
News media thankful
SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists)
SAG-AFTRA’s statement on AI is centered on protecting performers’ rights, ensuring human-centered creativity, and requiring informed consent, compensation, and union bargaining for the use of an actor’s digital likeness or voice. The union opposes the replacement of human performers with AI-generated content and maintains that artificial intelligence should be a tool that complements, not replaces, human artistry. They have implemented contractual protections and waivers to address these concerns in various agreements.
Theatrical performances have always been a collective experience. Yes, most of them are mediocre and forgettable. The good ones rise above that level. A very few are great, and rise to something we call "art."
So why do we make art? Well, we've been doing that since our ancestors started painting things on cave walls, chipping out figurines -- perhaps with religious connotations, perhaps not, we can only speculate -- or telling campfire stories. Or singing or dancing. Every culture in the world has some form of this, and has had since prehistoric times.
Somehow, this creative impulse seems to be bundled into a package of traits that we think are essential to making us human. That becomes a very spongy concept, but somewhere embedded in it is communication and collaboration with other people.
Theatrical performances are built around the iron triangle of writer, director and actor. Depending on the particulars of the production, numerous other crafts contribute, often in essential ways, but the iron triangle is the core. And in the very best works, the ones we put on our GOAT lists and to which we return, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The iron triangle, with an assist from the crafts, will present something. Now it's a dialogue with the audience. It's a four way conversation.
Do we need actors, directors and stagecraft for the core conversation? No, of course not. Just go read a book. Now it's a dialogue between you and the author. At one level, all AI in films is doing is centering the writer, eliminating the other collaborators, and providing computer generated illustrations for the writer's text.
Soon we won't even need the writer. Everyone will be able to enter their own prompts and the AI will generate the script, characters, stagecraft and artificial images. Ah, Utopia: in stead of a dialogue with other people who may surprise me, disappoint me, leave some loose ends dangling, and somehow lift me out of myself for a little while, I can spend my life in eternal, blissful communion with myself. This is terminal solipsism.
I frankly can't think of anything more boring that an eternal dialogue with myself. To me, that looks like mental illness. Now let's go talk about the terminally online, the TikTok addicts, the kids who can't get off their smartphones, etc. We are developing technologies that are proving to be profoundly destructive of human relationships, including the family, human interactions, the capacity the learn and grow, the capacity to experience surprise and to grow. The interaction is the fundamental purpose.
Yes, the film industry has some problems. It always has had. So does every other form of cultural production, as does every form of human interaction. And maybe theatrical productions will take a very different form in the future. But cutting real people out of the loop will kill what the enterprise is really about.
Heck, if our distant ancestors had only had a little talking box to tell the campfire stories, or an AI guided robot to paint the pictures on the cave walls, they would never had needed to engage their imaginations. This would not have been progress.
Movies and television have largely been taken over by Big Tech, which wants to sell subscriptions and engage in data harvesting to sell to advertisers. The top dogs are no longer movie people who want to attract real audiences to buy tickets; they want clicks that they can monetize. Quality is incidental. Big tech and the streamers are careening towards technologies that are rapidly destroying their product. And they don't care, because they think viewers can be dumbed down to the point at which they no longer value quality; they're just turning something on for background noise as they channel surf and chatter with friends.
On the surface, it's a wild, dystopian sci-fi action/adventure/comedy/horror mashup that is quite intentionally produced as a surrealistic parody of some of the broader issues in play here. I have reasons to think it may be very good.
But there are also some very serious questions in the subtext -- serious enough that every major studio and the streamers all passed on it, probably because they are terrified of originality and petrified at something that gores some sacred cows. So what do you think spooked all the big studios and the streamers, forcing this production to go full indie and scratch for every nickel to produce what (I'm pretty sure) will be a remarkably low-budget film? (I have a pretty good idea but I'm in no spoilers mode. Freepmail me if you are curious.)
Take a glance at the teaser trailer, which dropped two days ago. It plays hide the ball on most of the biggest and darkest issues, but I have reasons to think it may be very good, and directly on target for what is being discussed in this thread.
Here's the teaser trailer:
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die teaser trailer
Pause towards the end when the Man From the Future tells his ad hoc special ops team: "I won't sugarcoat it. You're in for a really weird night." Take a good look at the team. Have you ever seen a more fearsome group of desperados ready to follow Tom Cruise and a possible suicide mission? Me neither.
But the film will loop into their backstories just enough to understand why these late night diners at a Norm's Diner in LA are HIGHLY motivated to follow someone who looks and acts like a lunatic.
The trailer gives you a bit on the two schoolteachers. You get a tiny glimpse at Ingrid, the young woman in the Disney princess dress who is seen again in a dingy apartment being dismissed by a boyfriend, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. A couple of others remain complete mysteries. But at least one, and possible two, of these backstories involve very dark stuff -- dark enough to scare away the risk averse big studios that are running stale IP into the ground and destroying the industry ... and in the two festival screenings to date, the audiences were laughing their heads off at the darkest subplots. Now THAT's a highwire act with no net, but this is Gore Verbinski's return film after nine years on the sidelines, and if he's known for anything, it's being original and taking risks. Again, I have reasons for thinking this may be good, and the issues it is satirizing some things that need to be mocked.
Verbinski's point, which he is making in his current interviews, is that AI is a powerful and welcome tool for curing cancer and going to Mars. But we should raise the alarm when it goes after illustration, music and storytelling, and when it produces zombified people who can't get off their screens long enough to have a real conversation. Which is where we are rapidly heading.
On the surface, it's a wild, dystopian sci-fi action/adventure/comedy/horror mashup that is quite intentionally produced as a surrealistic parody of some of the broader issues in play here. I have reasons to think it may be very good, and on the surface, it's crazy enough that it might actually attract a lot of viewers who would run the other way if you hinted you had a serious message.
But there are also some very serious questions in the subtext -- serious enough that every major studio and the streamers all passed on it, probably because they are terrified of originality and petrified at something that gores some sacred cows. So what do you think spooked all the big studios and the streamers, forcing this production to go full indie and scratch for every nickel to produce what (I'm pretty sure) will be a remarkably low-budget film? (I have a pretty good idea but I'm in no spoilers mode. Freepmail me if you are curious.)
Take a glance at the teaser trailer, which dropped two days ago. It plays hide the ball on most of the biggest and darkest issues, but I have reasons to think it may be very good, and directly on target for what is being discussed in this thread.
Here's the teaser trailer:
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die teaser trailer
Pause towards the end when the Man From the Future tells his ad hoc special ops team: "I won't sugarcoat it. You're in for a really weird night." Take a good look at the team. Have you ever seen a more fearsome group of desperados ready to follow Tom Cruise and a possible suicide mission? Me neither.
But the film will loop into their backstories just enough to understand why these late night diners at a Norm's Diner in LA are HIGHLY motivated to follow someone who looks and acts like a lunatic.
The trailer gives you a bit on the two schoolteachers. You get a tiny glimpse at Ingrid, the young woman in the Disney princess dress who is seen again in a dingy apartment being dismissed by a boyfriend, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. A couple of others remain complete mysteries. But at least one, and possible two, of these backstories involve very dark stuff -- dark enough to scare away the risk averse big studios that are running stale IP into the ground and destroying the industry ... and in the two festival screenings to date, the audiences were laughing their heads off at the darkest subplots. Now THAT's a highwire act with no net, but this is Gore Verbinski's return film after nine years on the sidelines, and if he's known for anything, it's being original and taking risks. Again, I have reasons for thinking this may be good, and the issues it is satirizing include some things that need to be identified and mocked.
Verbinski's point, which he is making in his current interviews, is that AI is a powerful and welcome tool for curing cancer and going to Mars. But we should raise the alarm when it goes after illustration, music and storytelling -- broadly speaking, art and human communication -- and when it produces zombified people who can't get off their screens long enough to have a real conversation. Which is where we are rapidly heading.
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