Ralph Ineson perhaps said it best: “F**k off!”
The reassuringly blunt Yorkshire actor was responding, on X, to the news that “multiple talent agents are reportedly in talks to sign AI ‘actress’ Tilly Norwood”.
Are they? That word “reportedly” covers a lot of bases. Deadline was (ahem!) reporting from Zurich Film Festival, where Eline Van der Velden, founder of Particle6 Productions, calmly introduced the world to someone who doesn’t actually exist. “We’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be presenting her in the next few months,” she said of the digitally imagined Ms Norwood. We wait with interest.
Natasha Lyonne, star of Russian Doll and Poker Face, was among those getting their retaliation in first. “Any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds,” she said.
READ MORE
“That is really, really scary, Come on, agencies, don’t do that,” Emily Blunt said. “Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”
You might reasonably wonder how Particle6’s creation – whose pronoun we’re designating as “it” – has drummed up all this attention. Audrey Hepburn broke through sensationally in Roman Holiday. Brad Pitt took his shirt off in Thelma & Louise. What has Norwood done to rival Julie Andrews’s star-making turn in Mary Poppins?
[ Avoiding the temptation to replace journalists with AI is crucial for news mediaOpens in new window ]
Not much. It has appeared in only a ropy two-minute comedy video entitled AI Commissioner. A year or two ago the average viewer would have been reeling at the manner of the skit’s creation. “The video you’re about to view is 100 per cent AI Generated,” an opening message reads. “No humans (or bears!) were harmed in the making of this production.”
The convincingly flesh-coloured non-humans encountered in AI Commissioner do still give one pause, but we are all minutes away from being boringly unsurprised by any level of AI verisimilitude. The film’s human overlords, aware that the public are still uneasy about all this, have invited their machines to generate a comic self-own.
AI Commissioner is a lumpy satire on what the industry could become. Might we, as suggested there, end up with something like “I Know What You Streamed Last Summer”? One character describes this as “an interactive thriller built from your streaming history and Deliveroo orders”. Ha ha, I guess.
We end with the announcement of the AI-generated Tilly Norwood. A youngish brunette with a hint of the duchess of Sussex about it, the creation is what you might expect from high-level AI in the autumn of 2025. No doubt by the spring of 2026 it will seem as crude as a flipbook animation.
But, hang on, isn’t the entire project an exercise in spoofery?
Hard to tell. Van der Velden looked to be taking herself pretty seriously at the Zurich forum. Either way, the reaction from industry professionals demonstrates how enormously jumpy everyone is about the threat. The merest suggestion, however improbable, that this bland entity might become, as Van der Velden told Broadcast International, “the next Scarlett Johansson” is enough to send Hollywood’s collective elite, fiery torches in hands, lurching towards Castle Frankenstein.
The response has little to do with the Norwood project itself. What we’re seeing is a manifestation of the awareness that many creatives are about to become as redundant as the professional “knocker-uppers” who habitually banged on workers’ windows before the invention of the affordable alarm clock.
This will affect not just those working in the movies. It will affect IT professionals, HR personnel, telemarketers and even – quelle horreur! – journalists. Those workforces are like a mass of neurotic cattle grazing on the Chisholm Trail. One loud noise and we’re stampeding across Nebraska.
“Norwood!”
Moo! Moo! Stomp! Stomp!
I am enough of a sentimentalist to believe there is an accidental oddness to the human face and voice that no amount of brute-force coding can generate. Perfume-commercial beauty is relatively easy. But it is hard to imagine any machine coming up with a Bette Davis, a Maggie Smith or a Philip Seymour Hoffman. In other expressions of naivety, can I interest you in a trip to New York by merchant galleon?
In one vital area, Tilly Norwood has, however, shown itself the equal of any star in history. It is nice if such a person can act. It is preferable for them to be punctual. But nobody gets anywhere without the ability to generate publicity. The late Zsa Zsa Gabor managed to become a movie personality despite making few films even the most avid cineaste could name. But she did have to marry Conrad Hilton. She had to appear on Hollywood Squares. She had to exist.
Tilly Norwood has, this week, generated a fusillade of articles – you’re reading one right now – despite being nothing more than a tangle of electronic impulses. Would that Philip K Dick had lived to see it.
