Several talent agents are interested in signing Tilly Norwood, according to Deadline. Problem is, Tilly Norwood isn’t a real person. She’s an AI creation from Eline Van der Velden, a Dutch comedian and technologist who developed the “actress” with her production company, Particle6, through its new AI talent studio offshoot called Xicoia. At the Zurich Summit this past weekend, Van der Velden said discussions with agencies have progressed significantly since Norwood made her debut in a comedy sketch in July, adding an announcement about representation should arrive “in the coming months.”
As you might imagine, though, few Hollywood actors are happy about this potential watershed moment for the entertainment industry. Many actors have disparaged the move on social media, in comments on Deadline’s story, as well as through their own social media channels and comments to the press. Academy Award nominee Emily Blunt, while promoting her new A24 movie with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, The Smashing Machine, was asked to read portions of a report about Tilly Norwood aloud when she stopped by the Variety Awards Circuit podcast, and had a pretty visceral reaction.
“No, are you serious? That’s an AI? Good Lord, we’re screwed,” she said. “That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”
When Blunt was told agents want Norwood to be “the next Scarlett Johansson,” she responded: “But we already have Scarlett Johansson.”
Creator defends Tilly Norwood as ‘a piece of art’
Following the fierce backlash online, particularly from Hollywood actors, Tilly Norwood’s creator, Van der Velden, issued a detailed statement on Instagram.
“To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work—a piece of art,” she wrote. “Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.”
Van der Velden went on to say AI should not be a replacement for people, and that nothing “can take away the craft or joy of human performance,” but creating Tilly has been “an act of imagination” and “represents experimentation, not substitution.“
“I also believe Al characters should be judged as part of their own genre, on their own merits, rather than compared directly with human actors,” she added. “I hope we can welcome Al as part of the wider artistic family: one more way to express ourselves, alongside theatre, film, painting, music, and countless others.”
Van der Velden turned comments off for that particular Instagram post.
SAG-AFTRA’s response, and the exploitation argument
The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, which represents about 160,000 actors, creators, and media professionals, issued a pretty blunt statement about Tilly Norwood on Tuesday, saying the union is “opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.”
“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,” it said in a statement. “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.
“It 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,” it added.
Beyond protesting the use of computer-generated actors, many in Hollywood are also pointing out how exploitative it feels to have the first so-called AI actor pursued by talent agents be a young woman.
“Not surprised that the first major ‘AI actor’ is a young woman that they can fully control and make do whatever they want,” actor Chelsea Edmundson said in response to Deadline’s post about Tilly Norwood.
“And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her?” asked Mara Wilson, who rose to fame as a child actor in Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire. “You couldn’t hire any of them?”
“Shame on whoever is trying to normalize this,” actor Eiza González wrote in response. “Horrific and terrifying.”
For added context, it’s been less than two years since the historically long SAG-AFTRA strike, which stretched on for four months before finally ending in November 2023. AI protections were a key point of negotiations.