Is Tilly Norwood the Most Dangerous “Actress” in Hollywood?
Norwood’s rise is forcing the industry to confront who gets replaced and who gets protected. But how many fans does she really have?
You notice Tilly Norwood’s eyes before anything else. Wide, hazel, and coquettish, they recall countless CW ingenues from years gone by. There’s her hair, a wavy brown curtain that looks well kept but unfussy. And then, there’s the rest of her: slender build, full lips, button nose. It’s no wonder this aspiring actress dominated Hollywood headlines last year. She is, as her creator has put it in so many interviews, a classic "English rose."
Yes, her creator. Tilly is not a human, but a digital asset that has recently stoked fear that an AI performer could enter the same talent pipeline as real people. Furor over the AI actress erupted last year, when Eline Van der Velden, the person who made Tilly, said that multiple talent agencies had reached out for meetings. The claim spread fast across Hollywood as a sign that the gatekeeping machinery might be ready to make room for something nonhuman. (Van der Velden, for her part, has declined to name the agencies; WME and Gersh, two of the industry’s biggest players, have both said they would not represent Tilly.) Actress Melissa Barrera urged anyone repped by an agent who’d consider signing AI to "drop their a$$." Emily Blunt warned that the technology threatens "human connection." James Cameron called the prospect of replacing real actors with AI actors "horrifying."
Tilly isn’t the first AI entertainment figure to make waves, though. In 2017, Shudu Gram, "the world’s first digital supermodel," appeared on the scene, booking ad campaign gigs and bringing in followers by the hundreds of thousands. There’s also Lil Miquela, a social media character with space buns, soulless eyes, and perfectly placed freckles. You might have seen her on the cover of Highsnobiety in 2018, being interviewed in publications like Vogue and The Cut, or posing with human celebrities like Millie Bobby Brown and 50 Cent.
What separates Tilly from those earlier examples is that to some, at least, she can be read as plausibly human at a glance (though a closer look reveals subtle inconsistencies: freckles that appear and disappear, teeth that shift shape from image to image). That near-believability—paired with the speed at which her image traveled, and the claims that talent agencies had shown interest in representing her—helped turn Tilly into a mascot for our AI-saturated era.
We’re also in a different time when it comes to AI; it’s no longer a nebulous, futuristic concept. It’s here. Automation has displaced tens of thousands of human workers (likely more), Boomer parents send their kids computer-generated, fake bunny videos, and AI-generated songs can go viral before anyone asks who made them. If AI represents a new Wild West of robot therapists, personal assistants, and girlfriends, then what does that mean for art?
AI actress Tilly Norwood.
The human behind Tilly, Van der Velden, is a former actress with long blonde hair and a sunny smile. She studied at Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in the U.K. before earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics, then moved between acting and producing before founding her production company, Particle6, in 2015. It was there, she says, that she began asking how emerging technologies could help Hollywood, which eventually led her to create Tilly as a character to explore what an AI-first production might look like.
Van der Velden swears she isn’t coming for human actors’ jobs but, instead, is helping to create them. "We’re using AI to help get stories told in traditional film and TV in a better way with AI," she says. "When a budget is constrained...they might ask a writer to cut existing scenes. There’s so much compromise that happens in storytelling. I was like, How can we use AI as a force for good? And we can, you know, select all the scenes we could replace with AI...so that the storytelling becomes as good as it possibly could." That, Van der Velden says, will help "get more projects greenlit and get more jobs created."
She also insists that demand for human actors won’t disappear, because audiences want to see real people on screen. "Humans still have a real affinity to watching other real humans, so I think that would be the main reason to not just have AI films," Van der Velden says. Instead, she sees Hollywood expanding into three distinct categories: live action, animation, and AI.
Her argument hinges on one promise: that AI performers expand what gets made, rather than replacing the people already doing the work. But if the technology does take hold—producing actors that can be reused and iterated on without the usual constraints and costs of human talent, and performances become indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood embodiment—then that promise gets harder to count on. At that point, AI performers could start to look like a tempting shortcut.
Tilly seems to have opinions about this. On Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers, she seems to make light of the controversy around her—existence, creation, or whatever you want to call it. In one post she writes, "Hi, I’m Tilly Norwood—the first AI actress. Or, as some like to call me, 'the end of civilization.' Honestly...god forbid a girl has hobbies, right." There’s also a picture of her on stage accepting an award, with the caption, "Congratulations to all the Oscar nominees, even the ones who hate me! You’re all my heroes and I’m sorry for scaring you so much this year..."
I think it’s very upsetting that the first thing somebody did was create an image of a young woman that could be easily manipulated.
Actress Mara Wilson doesn’t see the future of Hollywood in Tilly Norwood. Instead, she sees a hollow, misguided imitator of what art is supposed to be.
Wilson starred in films like Matilda and Miracle on 34th Street before transitioning into writing and voice acting. She grew up loving Wallace & Gromit and, during a recent rewatch, marveled at the sight of thumbprints on the claymation. To her, the human touch is what makes art worthwhile.
"You look at a van Gogh painting, you see the brush strokes, you see the ferocity with which he was painting, and you know the struggles he was going through at the time; you know that he was putting it into his art," Wilson says.
Her mind drifts to artists who’ve used their skills to soothe broader societal pains, like how The Wire and Bruce Springsteen helped America process the collapse of manufacturing. If we let AI replace humans, she warns, then we won’t even have "anybody making a good song about AI taking everybody’s jobs."
Wilson’s AI aversion harkens back to painful memories from her child-acting days. Her parents had hoped that keeping their daughter in children’s movies would protect her from exploitation, but by age 12, her face had already been Photoshopped into pornography. In considering AI actors, she wonders what it means to create a performer with no real agency.
"I think it’s very strange and upsetting," she says, "that the very first thing that somebody did was create an image of a young woman that could be easily manipulated to do whatever they want."
We need policymakers and public policy to catch up.
Wilson is not alone. For many, the anxiety around AI stems from questions of consent and transparency. Picture this, for example: you sign your image rights to an AI presenting company for a little extra cash. Months pass. Then, out of the blue, a friend who’s been vacationing in South America tells you they saw your face on propaganda for a right-wing government.
Voiceover artist Laurence Bouvard, who serves as screen and new media committee chair for the U.K.-based acting union Equity, says that precise thing happened to one of her colleagues. "The company was like, 'Oops! Our bad,'" she says. She hears that response way too much.
That’s why labor unions are working to put guardrails in place. In the U.S., SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland believes generative AI could take center stage in the union’s contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers later this year. The goal, Crabtree-Ireland says, is straightforward: to ensure that studios’ uses of AI are "ethical, responsible and, frankly, respectful of human talent." Still, he’s clear that contracts alone won’t be enough: "We need policymakers and public policy to catch up."
Other entertainment guilds have been on alert as well. Lisa Zambetti—a founding member of Casting Society’s AI Planning Committee—has developed educational programming to help her fellow casting directors navigate AI. Zambetti says she’d vote for human casting any day, even for the bit role of Cute Barista Serving Coffee.
"We’re all connected," Zambetti says. If you’re using digital characters in on-camera projects, "you certainly don’t need a casting director. You certainly don’t need a makeup person, or a costumer, or a Teamster to drive them to set. It affects the whole ecosystem."
For all the panic surrounding AI performers, there are still several practical obstacles standing in their way. That includes tangled copyright questions about whether a character like Tilly can be protected at all, given the legal murk around how much "human authorship" is required for copyright, and whether the underlying training data was licensed or effectively scraped. But the biggest one, for now, is that they’re still not very good at, well, acting.
For proof, look no further than actor, writer, and director Sergio Cilli’s video series Will AI Actors Replace Us?! In the videos, Cilli plays a beleaguered director auditioning AI actors. It never goes well. Characters swap faces, glasses appear and disappear on faces, and in one shocking moment, a synth pulls a gun. Cilli says he doesn’t need to sabotage the auditions with faulty prompts; the output is just that bad. "You really cannot get what you want, and that’s sort of the bottom line," he says.
I think it’s up to consumers to say, 'You know what? We don’t want this.
AI evangelists insist the tech is bound to improve, but Bouvard, who holds a master’s degree in computer science, isn’t convinced. If AI has already feasted on large swathes of the internet, it’s unclear what new, quality content will be left for it to train on, especially now, as companies begin to wall off their proprietary data.
Actor, writer, and director Brendan Bradley also questions the narrative that AI is cheaper than traditional productions. "At this time, most of these [AI] companies are operating at losses," he says. "Sooner or later, those costs will be passed on to the consumer." Van der Velden confirms it took Particle6 a lot of work to make their pixel-based dream girl: 15 people, six months, and more than 2,000 iterations.
As eager as some Hollywood giants have been to jump on the AI bandwagon, these relationships also seem unstable at best. Consider, for example, OpenAI’s sudden choice to sunset its video generation tool, Sora — effectively killing its $1 billion deal with Disney less than six months after its announcement. And last year, reporting from The Wrap revealed that Lionsgate’s splashy deal with the AI company Runway had run into its own complications, as the studio’s full catalogue proved insufficient to generate high-quality, large-scale projects on its own.
But the real limiting factor for AI might not be so technical. Ultimately, Wilson believes the fate of the entertainment industry lies in all of our hands. "Hollywood is completely dependent upon the audience," she says. "So I think it’s up to consumers to say, 'You know what? We don’t want this.'"
So far, audiences have not been kind to AI-led productions. In January, an AI-animated short film series from Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky inspired an impassioned wave of backlash. As The Hollywood Reporter put it, “high-end AI slop is still AI slop.” And limited as they might be, Tilly Norwood’s “performances” have already faced negative reviews as well. Ahead of the Oscars (and soon after announcing the ongoing development of the “Tillyverse”) Particle6 and Xicoia released a music video, in which Tilly sings that “AI’s not the enemy, it’s the key.” Based on the internet’s response, it seems many people are not interested in walking through whatever door that key might open. And much like AI actors, Hollywood’s recent flurry of films about AI just keeps flopping.
We’ll have to wait for Tilly—or any AI actor, for that matter—to book a real gig to see how viewers respond. A publicist for Particle6 shared via email that Tilly has multiple projects in the pipeline, but declined to share details. For now, Tilly is like many pretty girls in Hollywood: young, hungry, and waiting for a breakout role. She just won’t feel any joy if, and when, it happens.
