Hollywood celebrities outraged over new ‘AI actor’ Tilly Norwood

Norwood “is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers,” the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, stated in an announcement.

“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,” the union stated.

The AI actor was created by Dutch actor and comic Eline Van der Velden who reportedly stated she wished Norwood to turn into the “next Scarlett Johansson”. The BBC has reached out to Van der Velden and her firm, Particle6.

Norwood’s Instagram page, external contains headshots from fake filming checks and an commercial spoofing packages on the BBC, together with being superimposed on the often-star-studded sofa on BBC’s The Graham Norton Show.

Amid the anger and backlash in Hollywood, the Dutch creator, external posted on Tilly’s Instagram web page to say that the creation is “not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art”.

“Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance,” Van der Velden wrote, including such creations ought to be judged “as part of their own genre” relatively than in comparison with human actors.