A “still” posted on Tilly Norwood’s Instagram account.
Over the weekend, Hollywood caught wind of a doe-eyed newcomer named Tilly Norwood whom talent agents have allegedly been dying to sign. “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman, that’s the aim of what we’re doing,” her rep, Eline van der Velden, told Broadcast International in July. Sure, she can get in line. Controversy officially struck on Saturday when Norwood made her public debut at the Zurich Film Festival. You see, the actress is no Silver Lake barista auditioning for parts in her free time: She is AI.
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Van der Velden, a Dutch comedian and technologist, revealed Norwood as a part of the launch of a new AI talent studio called Xicoia. “Budgets are shrinking. Content demand is rising,” she explained on LinkedIn. “Audiences? They care about the story — not whether the star has a pulse.” To me, the launch seems engineered for controversy, a rage-bait bid to attract cynical buy-in. Tech entrepreneurs have been trying to push AI entertainers for a while — remember Lil Miquela? — and Norwood is not anything spectacular. Her Instagram is bland, as is the AI-generated comedy sketch she “acts” in.
But Norwood got publicity, and the backlash was loud and swift. “Hope all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a$$,” Melissa Barrera posted to Instagram Stories. In the comments of a Deadline report about Norwood, the actress Jenna Leigh Green tagged SAG-AFTRA; meanwhile Lukas Gage joked, “She was a nightmare to work with!!!!” Soon van der Velden clarified in a statement sent to Deadline and posted to Norwood’s social media, “She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work … Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI opened fresh possibilities without taking away from live acting, AI offers another way to imagine and build stories.”
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The controversy made its way to The View, where Whoopi Goldberg challenged AI creators to “bring it on. You can always tell them from us. We move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently.” On Tuesday, SAG-AFTRA weighed in with an official statement that it “believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered … [Tilly Norwood] doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”
The notion that an up-and-coming AI avatar could ever be Scarlett Johansson is especially provocative, considering the actress’s recent win against OpenAI. It is also absurd. As SAG-AFTRA noted, “[Tilly] has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.” The nature of modern celebrity demands actors constantly perform humanness off-screen. Fans want to see their spontaneously riff with co-workers on red carpets and pop into the local tacqueria for lunch. That just does not work with AI. That said, I would like to see Tilly Norwood try to play Samantha in Her.
