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.
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
This was all foreseen by the movie S1M0NE. Interesting movie, but not one of Pacino’s better efforts, and ran about half an hour too long.
If she is silent on politics isn’t that a big improvement?
Will AI actors tell us what we should believe politically and what they think about global warming? Golly, whatever would I do without Rosie Odonnel telling me I’m racist.
Conceptually, I have no problem with a human looking digital image. After all, Bill Bixby was in My Favorite Martian as a regular human, then he was The Hulk. Bill Bixby as The Hulk is no more repulsive than the AI “girl” in the article. I wouldn’t believe either of them to be real.
“Conceptually, I have no problem with a human looking digital image. After all, Bill Bixby was in My Favorite Martian as a regular human, then he was The Hulk. Bill Bixby as The Hulk is no more repulsive than the AI “girl” in the article. I wouldn’t believe either of them to be real.”
Good points all...I agree.
good point
i hope to get an autograph and hopefully a selfie
or not
🤣
> Conceptually, I have no problem with a human looking digital image. <
Agreed. I’d only ask for a bit of transparency. If it’s AI, say it’s AI.
There are a ton of historical videos on Facebook of historical events that never happened. They are all AI-generated, and look very convincing.
Lots of misleading misinformation going on there.
Bixby turned into the Hulk who was played by Lou Ferrigno.
It’s a bad deal for actors, but who likes them anyway?
I believe so, yes.
Exactly.
AI will destroy all of humanity, and it cannot be stopped….
Any bets on how long?
25 years, 50 years, 100 at the outside…..
Amazing!
Hollywood is dead! A lot of actors are going to be looking for barista jobs.
Try having a discussion about that with an AI system. I had a long “discussion” with Grok about that topic a few days ago. A lot of the conversation was about the reduced need for humans to produce everything people could want. How will people live when they don’t have fulfilling work? How much money or wealth could each person have if AI and robots produce everything for us? Can the earth produce enough energy to power Artificial Generalized Intelligence (short answer “no”).
Can’t wait for the big AI comebacks of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, taking on gang bangers in the ’hood . . .
I recently saw a couple of videos with an infant old enough to sit up but not walk interacting with some cute puppies. He would point and they would lie down or roll over or turn up their noses and howl, and so forth. Then I saw 3 or 4 more similar videos - clearly AI - and my assessment went from “How adorable!” to zero interest.
Fake is fake. As was Ahnold in one of the more recent Terminator movies.
Ai actresses won’t keep opening their mouths ripping the company they work for, and fans, and tank their own projects.
I think it will become a real solution.
“It’s a bad deal for actors, but who likes them anyway?”
Just technology advancing the workforce. No different than robotics in assembly, or self-driving trucks.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving industry, filled with self-important, smug, holier than thou, narcissistic, a-holes.
Wonder who will hand Tilly the Oscar?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.