'That's Absolutely Not My Plan,' Creator Of AI Actress Tilly Norwood Denies She's Trying to Replace Human Actors

Tilly Norwood, the controversial AI-generated actress, is not intended to replace human actors, its creator recently said.

“That’s not what she’s here for and that’s absolutely not my plan,” Particle6 CEO Eline Van Der Velden told ABC News last week. 

Norwood was unveiled by Particle6 in September and was met with negative reactions from many Hollywood stars and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The AI-generated actress has not yet appeared in any movies or TV shows. 

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"I don't know how to quite answer it, other than to say how terrifying this is," actress Emily Blunt told Variety. "Come on, agencies, don't do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection."

Van Der Velden, an actress who has appeared in British and Dutch TV shows, wants to help creative industries integrate AI actors like Norwood in a way that helps them, she told ABC. 

"I’m part of the creative industry, so I want us to be in control of the guidelines and the ethics around this and it not to be imposed by the tech industry,” Van Der Velden said. 

AI and Hollywood 

Artificial intelligence was one of the central issues of a months-long SAG-AFTRA strike that ended in late 2023 when the union secured protections against AI usage in movies and TV shows, including compensation for actors who are digitally replicated by AI.

SAG-AFTRA officials have been skeptical of most AI projects in the film industry, including Norwood and Disney (NYSE:DIS) licensing its characters for use in OpenAI's Sora. 

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"To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood' is not an actor," the union said in a statement on its website,
"it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. 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."

Artificial intelligence could be the key to helping productions stay under budget and wrap sooner than traditional methods, Van Der Velden told ABC News. 

"In the traditional film and TV industry, there’s a lot of productions that are missing, say 20 or 30% of the budget,” she said. “And so they never actually go into full production. So by using AI and facilitating that budget to be lower, we’re actually getting productions going and getting more people into work."

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The ‘AI genre'

Artificial intelligence can be used to create a new genre of storytelling, according to Van Der Velden. 

"It’s a great poetic space where you can create anything beyond that’s possible within camera," she told ABC News. "So we really want to play in that. We think there’s a whole creative renaissance happening and a great new way to tell new stories.”

One of those stories is slated to hit TV screens in the Netherlands early next year. "Streets of the Past," will use AI to show viewers what historical Dutch sites looked like years ago, according to media reports. 

Future AI-assisted projects will help the overall film industry grow, Van Der Velden said to ABC News.

“We’re going to expand as an industry, not just animation, film and TV, but also this AI genre,” she said. “I think there’ll be lots of different films in which hopefully Tilly can star and we can tell stories through Tilly.”

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