Tilly Norwood is the talk of the town in Hollywood right now. But unlike most actresses, it’s not because of a performance, activism or even a public blowup. It’s because Norwood isn’t an actress at all: She’s an artificial intelligence tool. The recent news that several agents were in talks to sign Norwood, the creation of actor, comedian and tech entrepreneur Eline Van der Velden, has sparked widespread backlash across Hollywood. It has resurfaced concerns about AI replacing human jobs in the creative arts and has sparked questions about the very nature of human creativity.
However, does an AI “actress” like Norwood really spell doom for acting as an art form?
In Hollywood, that’s the prevailing anxiety. Actors like Emily Blunt, Whoopi Goldberg and Melissa Berrera quickly voiced anger over the potential movement of AI into acting. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA, Hollywood’s 160,000-member actors union, had some strong words of its own. “SAG-AFTRA believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics,” the union said in a statement, repeating concerns voiced during its 2023 strike.
“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” SAG-AFTRA continued. “It 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.”
