Tilly Norwood, a rising brunette bombshell, is collecting a horde of Hollywood haters. Why? She’s not a real person.
As of Saturday, the A.I. generated “actress” is circulating the market for agents. So far, she has made an appearance in one comedy sketch: “The AI Commissioner,” a film produced by video production company Particle 6. Though the cost to feature the actress in productions has not yet been released, she is now licensed for producers to use.
Particle6 and their image generation studio Xicoia, the developers who created Norwood, are pushing for agencies to sign the actress.
“We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,” said Particle6 CEO Eline Van Der Velden in an interview with Broadcast International.
Particle6 produces custom A.I. characters to “lead campaigns, connect with audiences, and scale across the social media landscape,” according to the company’s website.
The development of the A.I.-generated “actress” and the push for Norwood’s character to enter the film industry has sparked outrage from creatives like Emmy-winning actor Lamorne Morris, known for his work in “Fargo” and “New Girl.”
“I’ll keep it brief. I think it’s silly,” Morris said, adding that the concept of pushing A.I. “actors” over human creatives is “kind of strange.”
“I think the human element, scars and all, are what drives people to watch these particular stars, their stories,” Morris said.
Ryan Stelling, a sophomore at USC’s School of Dramatic Arts, feels that A.I. cannot replicate his art form.
“Acting is the one that, I think, comes solely from how we interact with each other and how we relate to each other, and is the sole product of being human,” Stelling said. “Without humans, you don’t have acting.”
Morris explained that being an actor is more than delivering dialogue, but also about being “a person that we can go to an event and see in person, a person that we can go and watch do a talk show live, a person that will sign an autograph for us, a person that will tell their life story because we can relate.”
The announcement of the new A.I. actress comes after a three-month-long strike led by SAG-AFTRA, the largest labor union for media professionals. The union protested A.I. in the film industry two years ago, resulting in codified protections against A.I.
The deal included over $1 billion in new compensation and guardrails for the use of artificial intelligence. This came as a result of protests for better labor compensation and “protection from abusive use of AI technology,” said SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland.
The union stated in a press release shared Tuesday that “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.”
Creatives including Michael Sullivan, an actor based in Los Angeles, similarly believe that A.I.-generated figures like Norwood cannot replace human entertainers.
“To say that she’s an actress is an insult to the humans who have, you know, studied and perfected that craft,” Sullivan said.
Stelling echoed that actors’ work cannot be replicated, explaining that A.I. — unlike human creatives — does not “put in these years and years and years of work in learning how to put on another person’s face and walk in their shoes and be another person.”
He said his work is more than what A.I. companies inserting computer-generated characters into the industry make it out to be.
“It’s just insulting,” said Stelling.
Norwood’s developers also gave the character “a fictional backstory all her own, and a ‘personal life’ that is being scripted and or generated by Xicoia’s programmers,” said Particle6. But Morris said that there is a certain aspect of star power and personability that an A.I. character can never possess.
“If my agent signed an A.I. actress,” Morris said, “I’m not 1,000% sure they would be my agent anymore.”