“You’ll either get it or pretend you don’t,” AI-generated character Tilly Norwood’s Instagram bio declares. SAG-AFTRA has joined celebrities like Melissa Barrera, Natasha Lyonne, and Whoopi Goldberg in reacting with disgust to the claim that talent agencies are interested in signing the AI avatar to star in real projects. Following the backlash, Tilly’s creator issued a statement standing ten toes down for tech that infamously struggles with hands and feet. Below, the tizzy over Tilly.
Tilly was created by actor turned producer Eline van der Velden’s U.K.-based AI production studio, Particle6. “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman, that’s the aim of what we’re doing,” van der Velden told Broadcast International in July. The character’s first onscreen appearance was in the two-minute Particle6 comedy sketch “AI Commissioner,” which used ten pieces of AI software to bring a script initially generated by ChatGPT to life.
Tilly’s Facebook page celebrated the video as her “first role,” with a post noting, “I may be AI generated, but I’m feeling very real emotions right now. I am so excited for what’s coming next!” Broadcast International’s July report suggested that talks were already underway that could lead to Tilly starring in movies and a “raft of other projects.”
Multiple talent agencies have expressed interest in working with Tilly, van der Velden claimed to an audience at the Zurich Film Festival’s Zurich Summit on September 27. “When we first launched Tilly, people were like, ‘What’s that?,’ and now we’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months,” van der Velden said, per Deadline.
“Hope all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a$$. How gross, read the room,” Melissa Barrera wrote in an Instagram Story. In Deadline’s Instagram comments, Mara Wilson questioned, “And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?” Fantastic Four star Ralph Ineson tweeted an even more succinct reaction: “Fuck off.”
Even an actor who believes that AI does have a place in the industry was part of the backlash: Natasha Lyonne, who co-founded a company that touts itself as the first “ethical” AI studio because its model is trained on licensed content, covered Tilly’s face with vomit emoji in an Instagram Story sharing Deadline’s piece. “Any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds,” she declared. “Deeply misguided & totally disturbed. Not the way. Not the vibe. Not the use.”
Whoopi Goldberg argued that AI-generated actors have “a bit of an unfair advantage” when asked to comment on Tilly during the September 29 episode of The View. “The problem with this, in my humble opinion, is that you are suddenly up against something that’s been generated with 5,000 other actors,” Goldberg said, per EW. But she also suggested that she’s up for the challenge, concluding, “Bring it on. You can always tell them from us. We move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently.”
In a lengthy Instagram statement addressed to those who “have expressed anger” over Tilly, van der Velden noted that she herself is an actor and argued that the character is a form of artistic expression. “I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a new tool — a new paintbrush,” she wrote. “Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI opened fresh possibilities without taking away from live acting, AI offers another way to imagine and build stories.” The message, which was also shared on Tilly’s account, concluded with a call for people to “welcome AI as part of the wider artistic family” and “celebrate all forms of creativity.”
Of course the actors’ union has opinions. SAG-AFTRA’s stance is that creativity should remain “human-centered” and that real people shouldn’t be replaced by “synthetics,” according to a September 30 statement that also reminded producers are contractually obligated to give notice and bargain if they want to use “synthetic performers.” The guild is so against the concept of humanizing Tilly that it pointedly only referred to the character as “it” throughout the statement. “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,” the statement read. “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.”
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