Imagine an actor who never ages, never walks off set or demands a higher salary.
That’s the promise behind Tilly Norwood, a fully AI-generated “actress” currently being courted by Hollywood’s top talent agencies. Her synthetic presence has ignited a media firestorm, denounced as an existential threat to human performers by some and hailed as a breakthrough in digital creativity by others.
But beneath the headlines lies a deeper tension. The binaries used to debate Norwood — human versus machine, threat versus opportunity, good versus bad — flatten complex questions of art, justice and creative power into soundbites.
The question isn’t whether the future will be synthetic; it already is. Our challenge now is to ensure that it is also meaningfully human.
All agree Tilly isn’t human
Ironically, at the centre of this polarizing debate is a rare moment of agreement: all sides acknowledge that Tilly is not human.
Her creator, Eline Van der Velden, the CEO of AI production company Particle6, insists that Norwood was never meant to replace a real actor. Critics agree, albeit in protest. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors in the U.S., responded with:
“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.”
Their position is rooted in recent history: In 2023, actors went on strike over AI. The resulting agreement secured protections around consent and compensation.
So if both sides insist Tilly isn’t human, the controversy, then, isn’t just about what Tilly is, it’s about what she represents.
That's been happening. Source Film Maker (SFM) is a tool used to make movies from video game characters, but there are repositories that have characters from much more than just video games, and a lot of them have nude models. So they've been making porn with computer-generated characters for a while, no AI needed. AI will just make it easier, and the creation of such accessible to more people (e.g. take this model and make her do this that and the third).
The bright side (or the dark side, I suppose it depends who you ask) is that you can ask the AI or CGI character to do things you might not feel comfortable asking a human actress to do. Again, I'm not sure if that's a net good or bad for humanity, but at least it's just a computer doing it, right, and not a human woman with feelings?
The issue with the last point is that many people already have difficulties separating actors from roles. I can't unsee Astin's Samwise Gamgee and even when Blanchett played Hela in the MCU I had to stop thinking about her as Galadriel, because those are the characters burned in my mind for those faces. And I'm far from the worst there: We've had plenty of examples of people getting hated for a character they put on the screen, or stalked or otherwise pigeonholed into a single role.
I worry that this will only extend into the human-/GenAI-made distinction. People already make porn of existing persons, sexualise their feet and more. Increasingly advanced GenAI will make that more prolific. I worry that a generated facsimile of some real person will lead to the "original" getting associated with and harassed over whatever thing the prompter made the former do, particularly with things you might not feel comfortable asking a human actress to do.
The knock-on might be that human actors may increasingly feel like they have to also do things you might not normally feel comfortable asking them to do in order to compete. The "I prefer real people making my porn/movies" appeal may be an edge, but only for as long as "real people" also make the stuff I like to see.
Worse still, the actors might not personally feel that way, but Hollywood doesn't always run on free will, and I'm not optimistic that the adult movie industry is all consent and sunshine. If the agent thinks there's more money to be made...
The flipside of putting an actor's face on smut is that you could just as easily put any face on an actor. Cate Blanchett's characters won't have to look like one another any more than Grey DeLisle's characters look like one another. Cast your leads from This Person Does Not Exist. Like if Iron Man had Robert Downey Jr's acting, but looked like the Avengers video game version.