The news of Tilly Norwood’s feature-length movie debut again brought out the digital pitchforks surrounding her existence, with commenters weighing in on everything from the concept of an AI actress leading a film to why entertainment outlets such as Variety covered the news.
Norwood’s creator is taking the backlash in stride, insisting that she’s just trying to show the industry the art of what’s possible with the tech.
AI-focused studio Particle 6 announced Monday that it was in production on “Misaligned,” a comedy-drama Norwood will “star” in that will combine human crewmembers with AI tools.
Elise van der Velden, founder and CEO of the London-based company, told Variety via email that the intention behind the feature is to “demonstrate where AI is at — and upskill and bring as many people as possible from the industry with us into the future.”
“More people than ever before are hearing and understanding that message,” she said, claiming there’s been a “noticeable uplift” in interest from creatives since the announcement. “And if we can get more people working in AI and future-proofing their roles, a little criticism won’t matter.”
Whether people in the entertainment industry really are receptive to that message is open for debate. Many of the associations representing professionals in the biz showed little desire to discuss Norwood’s film debut. But what’s clear is that some in Hollywood see the Norwood persona as a persistent threat and continue to question whether the AI “actor” has been trained on content without permission or compensation.
In a statement to Variety, U.K. performers’ union Equity said that when “it comes to the use of AI avatars — whether that’s ‘Tilly Norwood’ or any others — there are concerns about how a digital replica or avatar was created” and that it believed “transparency, consent and remuneration are key to addressing AI use in the film, TV and audio industries.”
“While data scraping and untraceable training data sources continue, the questions of theft and misuse will persist,” Cathy Sweet, Equity’s head of film and TV, said in a statement. “Actors, voice artists and performers of all kinds are left vulnerable to their work being stolen and used without their consent or even knowledge. This isn’t OK and it has to stop.”
Because Norwood is not a person, she “can’t really be a performer,” said Ted Tremper, interim executive director of the Creators Coalition on AI whose co-founders include the Daniels, Natasha Lyonne and former Academy president Janet Yang.
“It’s a character that’s created from that’s an assemblage of a tremendous amount of unseen extracted creativity and the name, image, and likenesses of people who haven’t been credited or compensated for the work that it took to create,” Tremper said, adding that she posed the question of “whether or not people know how it’s made and whether or not the human beings who were whose work was extracted to create it are being respected and paid.”
Representatives for the Writers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America, two unions representing Hollywood’s legion of scribes and filmmakers, did not respond to Variety’s requests for comment on the news about a Norwood-led film. The Motion Pictures Editors Guild declined to comment for now about the prospect of editors working on a film featuring Norwood, while the Hollywood performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, pointed to its past statements on Norwood’s emergence, one of which called her the “synthetic construct generated by software trained on the work of countless professional performers, real human beings, whose work was taken without permission, without credit and without compensation.”
According to van der Velden, Norwood was not “based on any specific person’s likeness” and instead created through “original prompting, thousands of iterations and substantial human creative oversight” along with “openly available tools — which draw on everything ever uploaded to the internet — including my own work as an actress.” Norwood will only appear in films created by AI, she said, not those featuring real people.
“Yes, we agree, Tilly isn’t a person,” van der Velden added. “She is an AI actor, a character created by Particle 6 to highlight, demonstrate and teach people about AI.”
Nearly a year after Norwood broke into public view with van der Velden’s claim that talent agencies were eager to represent the AI performer, one talent agency partner told Variety they couldn’t “imagine the complexities of representing a synthetic actor like a Tilly, given that that’s not a person.” Agencies including WME and Gersh also have bucked at the thought. Van der Velden said Particle 6’s conversations with talent agencies ceased after September and the company doesn’t believe one is necessary at the moment.
Tremper said he could imagine a future where AI usage isn’t vilified and synthetic or duplicated actors emerge with proper compensation. However, he said, doing so would require “a tremendous amount of good faith” collaboration between those making and using the technology.
“Once we actually, as a society, understand the ways that things are made, we are able to form a consensus,” he said, such as through voting or community organizing. “I think the most insidious thing that happens is that the people who make these [AI] tools, services and characters want to convince the audience that they don’t have a choice or that they don’t have self-determination, and that all of this is inevitable, and that is extraordinary. That is demonstrably false.”
The tug-of-war surrounding Norwood’s existence comes as the industry continues to grapple with generative AI. Reactions in the business have ranged from ostracization to tepid curiosity — and all the way to wholesale embrace, all while studios try to enforce regulations that protect humans’ likenesses and jobs.
Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri, speaking to Variety at the “Minions & Monsters” premiere just before word of Norwood’s feature-film debut came out, said his team was “complete believers in the human imagination” and felt “no pressure to push AI into our pipeline.”
“I wish I had a crystal ball,” Meledandri added. “I wish I could understand where it’s going, and I worry about the future of work across all industries.”
Marc Malkin contributed to this report.
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