Last week at the Zurich Film Festival, Eline Van der Velden — founder and CEO of AI production house Particle6 and its subsidiary talent studio Xicoia — said that a number of talent agents had expressed interest in working with Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress” created by the companies. Van der Velden has not gone into detail about which agencies might be contemplating whether they should bring Norwood (and by extension, Xicoia) on as clients. But simply saying that agents have come knocking was enough to get the entertainment industry trades buzzing and posting stories about how Norwood came to be.
Norwood is the first of many lifelike digital avatars being cooked up at Xicoia, and Van der Velden has said that she wants “Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.” So far, the character’s biggest “role” has been in Particle6’s “AI Commissioner” video parodying the TV production process. Like many gen AI startup founders, Van der Velden speaks about Tilly Norwood’s potential acting career with a confidence that doesn’t really seem warranted when you actually see what the avatar is doing. A lot of Tilly Norwood’s rollout feels like a stunt that could easily be ignored. But buzz-generating stunts like this can also lead to nonsensical ideas like “AI actors” becoming normalized in people’s minds.
There is an intellectual dishonesty to calling Tilly Norwood an actress that becomes abundantly clear when you understand what Xicoia has been developing. Tilly Norwood is not a real woman who can think, act, or make decisions independently — it is an animated avatar whose movements and speech are generated by an AI model trained on footage of actual people. Deadline reports that Xicoia wants to give people ways to interact with Tilly online where the avatar could “engage in unscripted conversations, perform monologues, respond to trends in real time and adapt tone and references to suit platform-specific audiences.” Some of Tilly’s responses will be automated, but the avatar also requires “human creative oversight” in order to function properly.
In essence, Tilly Norwood is a digital puppet that can be made to do whatever the folks at Xicoia want it to, and that seems to be a marketing point the company wants to stress. At one point in “AI Commissioner,” a skeezy male avatar says that it is in love with Tilly because “she’ll do anything I say,” which makes it seem like Xicoia is trying to appeal to an audience keen on seeing these characters doing things other than “acting.” The whole video is creepy, but also telling in terms of what Xicoia thinks Tilly can be used for.
Van der Velden — herself a former actor and comedian — probably knows that there is more to acting than reciting lines, hitting marks, and dressing up in costumes. She also likely understands that, unless the project was an in-house Xicoia production, inserting Tilly into a movie or series would pose a number of technical challenges. But regardless of whether Van der Velden actually believes that Xicoia’s gen AI creations can do what living performers can, she is seeding the idea that it’s possible by getting Tilly Norwood’s name into people’s mouths and minds.
This kind of marketing tactic is similar to the hyperbolic doomerism that AI boosters have used to hype up their products. As odd as it is to hear AI’s proponents gleefully sounding alarms about how destructive the technology they’re developing is, it makes much more sense when you think about those warnings as a kind of advertisement. It implies that everything about gen AI is inevitable rather than a result of the decisions people are making. And that implied inevitability is meant to make you more willing to accept and buy into the gen AI hype machine — even when the tech doesn’t really work the way it was promised.
Tilly Norwood may never make it big the way Xicoia wants, but just days after the avatar began making headlines, Italian producer Andrea Iervolino announced that he has been developing an AI director designed to “celebrate the poetic and dreamlike language of great European cinema.” All of this feels ridiculous because that’s exactly what it is. But the larger goal is to inure you to the strangeness of it all so that when these products — be they movies, shows, or TikToks — finally come to market, your reaction is “Sure, why not?”
Even if agents aren’t banging on Xicoia’s door in hopes of getting into the Tilly Norwood business, the company is trying to speak that outcome into reality. It recently told Variety that “everyone wants an interview with Tilly.” And if the avatar were to secure talent representation, it would send a message to the entertainment industry that some see digital constructs as being just as capable of doing jobs that have traditionally been done by living people.
What’s funny about the Tilly Norwood fuss is that the avatar isn’t even much of an industry first. The internet is filled with AI-generated images and footage of brunette women, and it is hard to forget Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’s Aki Ross — a “virtual actress” (voiced by Ming-Na Wen) that Squaresoft tried to turn into a real-world celebrity. The big difference here is that Xicoia, like basically every gen AI outfit, is trying to brute force itself into relevance even as real people within the entertainment industry have cried foul. SAG-AFTRA hit the nail on the head when it said that Tilly Norwood “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.”
Unlike Tilly Norwood, SAG-AFTRA’s concerns are very, very real, and much more deserving of our attention.
