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 just a cartoon character, though. The woman from the Final Fantasy movie, I mean. She was completely controlled by humans.
An AI actress would be able to be handed a script and could actually do the things without humans having to model her movements. The computer is doing the same work on the back end, but it takes a lot less human talent and creativity to do so.
Think about what it would take to get a computer-animated woman to walk down a street or up a hill. Now imagine something complicated — this is gonna sound weird, but the first thing that came to mind, when she was 10-11, my sister had this trick she'd do, our mom would toss her a shirt and tell her to try it on. Rather than go behind a closed door and change like a normal person, but also without exposing her chest to my brother and I, or asking us to turn around, she would put the new shirt on on top of the old one, and do a little dance and toss the old shirt aside, exposing nothing (maybe some tummy). A lot of girls could do it. I think it involves pulling the arms in both sleeves and slipping the inner one out and over the neck, but I never tried it. It's probably way simpler than it looks. Nevermind that though. It's way weirder than it sounds. It's something preteen girls know how to do, though. So imagine having to animate that. As opposed to having an AI actress just do it. So you have to tell the AI how the human body moves. Elbows, fingers, aren't double jointed etc., you have to have limits on the range of motion. Can't cheat, can't touch your elbow with the hand on the same side. Also, even under the top shirt, the bottom shirt has to obey the law of physics. It can't clip through the arms or the breasts, and the whole thing has to fit within certain laws of physics. Still, given all that, the AI should be able to just do it. A real person might have to get on a webcam and show the AI the maneuver, but given a couple examples (which it may even be able to find on the Web), it can do it. Then you just have the scene written like, her friend gives her a shirt to try on, so she puts it on, slips out of the old one without exposing any private areas, and twirls around, showing it off — and the AI just does it.
I would be shocked if any diffusion model could do that based on a description. Most can't overfill a wine glass.
Rendering over someone demonstrating the movement, as video-to-video, is obviously easier than firing up Blender. But: that's distant from any dream of treating the program like an actress. Each model's understanding is shallow and opinionated. You cannot rely on text instructions.
The practical magic from video models, for the immediate future, is that your video input can be real half-assed. Two stand-ins can play a whole cast, one interaction at a time. Or a blurry pre-vis in Blender can go straight to a finished shot. At no point will current technologies be more than loose control of a cartoon character, because to these models, everything is a cartoon character. It doesn't know the difference between an actor and a render. It just knows shinier examples with pinchier proportions move faster.