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.
I fully endorse photorealistic cartoons. Characters can look like anything, without having to find a specific guy and hope fits the role.
Getting the cartoon onscreen can still involve an actual actor. Diffusion turns whatever you have into whatever you describe. Turning a guy into another guy is not a big ask. It’s how some of this mess started, with Nicolas Cage deepfaked as Superman, and defictionalizing the Stallone version of The Terminator. The target face does not need to be a real person. Three actors can stage nearly any script.
Same goes for voice-acting. VAs are understandably concerned about being cloned. Nobody’s talking about the opposite: making up what characters sounds like, so any actor can play anybody. Or everybody. You can even substitute, when a scene needs extra oomph - like a band featuring a guitarist for a solo. Same sound… distinct performance.
If anyone can play a role, there is no longer any need for voice actors.
Changing your voice won’t fix bad acting.
The voice is the acting. It’s in the name.
Like a character’s just a face.
Everyone’s got a Homer Simpson impression. Very few of them sound like Dan Castellaneta. This tech fixes how your vocal cords are shaped - not whether you can pull off an American accent.
You dont need AI to pitch shift a voice.
Uh huh. So it’s more than naive pitch-shifting, but less than somehow fixing “oh god oh man oh man oh god.” Like how someone sounds is more complex than playback speed, but still distinct from how they choose to say things.
You can figure this out. I believe in you.
That’s called acting.
Voice acting is acting.
The name is a hint.
But acting skill alone won’t let Idris Elba sound like Tilda Swinton. AI can.