AI Actor Tilly Norwood’s Universe Is Growing. Her Creator Says Get Used To It

AMSTERDAM — Tilly Norwood was trying her best not to radiate doom, but reassurances can be elusive when you don’t really exist.

Norwood made headlines last year as the world’s first AI actor. When she (virtually) took the stage here to open the IBC conference alongside her creator, Particle 6 Founder-CEO Eline van der Velden, it was principally to assure the audience. I come in peace, Norwood offered. Or at least not to wholly obliterate Hollywood jobs and creativity.

“I’m not trying to steal anything from anyone,” Norwood said with icy placidity. “I’m more like a new kind of paintbrush.”

Appearing via video call in what was billed as her first live appearance, Norwood fielded questions directed to her via van der Velden’s onstage laptop. Those exchanges were punctuated by uncanny twitches and overlong pauses.

For van der Velden, Norwood is a kind of preemptive strike against AI’s inevitable role in production. “Everyone’s trying to future-proof themselves because this is coming,” she said. “We’re just trying to put this tech into a really fun jacket — which is Tilly — and illustrate it.”

Van der Velden said that as a small British company, Particle 6 has been more unleashed to experiment with Norwood’s capacities than larger Hollywood studios would be.

“It’s here now,” she said, “so how are we going to ethically use it?”

Particle 6 is already answering that question, van der Velde said, currently developing a Norwood movie, Misaligned, along with a tranche of other AI actors it plans to unleash in the “Tillyverse.”

Pushing back against criticisms, van der Velde likened AI resistance to early opposition to “talkies” over 100 years ago. She said actors are “working more than ever” to train their synthetic counterparts.

As to job displacement worries, “absolutely there’s going to be a huge transition,” she said. “What I’m doing is preparing for that transition.”

Relative to AI’s incursion into industries like defense and finance, van der Velden says, “this is not too serious.”

But nevertheless, she sees AI’s entrenchment in media and entertainment as an arms race. “We can’t win the arms race,” she said. “Instead, what we can win is implementing the creativity.”

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