AI Actress Tilly Norwood Condemned by SAG-AFTRA: Tilly ‘Is Not an Actor… It Has No Life Experience to Draw From, No Emot

[ap215]

AI Actress Tilly Norwood Condemned by SAG-AFTRA: Tilly ‘Is Not an Actor… It Has No Life Experience to Draw From, No Emotion’

SAG-AFTRA has issued a statement condemning Tilly Norwood, the AI “actress” who has become a contentious subject in Hollywood after her creator, Eline Van der Velden, recently claimed that multiple talent agents were interested in signing the AI creation. The acting guild believes “creativity is, and should remain, human-centered” and “is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.”

“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” SAG-AFTRA wrote in a statement. “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. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/sag- ... 236534779/

[ZoWie]

This is going to get worse. Shots will be generated by machines. Actors will sometimes be replaced by software, or by machine-generated likenesses that agents license out. One of the strikes already came when an actors' union found out that a shot had been generated by a machine that put an actor's likeness on a low-paid stand-in. I don't know about cameras yet, but I do know for sure that right now there is no reason why the whole frame can't be generated by machines. At that point, the few remaining theaters will be essentially download or streaming presentations. People seem to be fine with looking at movies on cell phones.

The sound mix was always a very creative part of the process. Skilled engineers and sound FX experts really livened up movies. This will presumably all go to machines and synthesizers, like a lot of dance music is already made, and movie sound will become as boring as that dance crap.

The unions want to make compromise deals to keep humans in the process. I suspect this will have partial success, but the future still looks grim. At some point, the entire creative output of the human race and all its experiences will be sliced diced and processed by some program you can rent from the oligarchy, and creativity will involve sitting at expensive consoles and concocting "art" that essentially regurgitates the past in slightly newer arrangements.

At that point, there will come to be an underground that values human creations, and that will become a Thing. There will be some kind of rebellion against machine-generated entertainment, but it's not possible to predict what the result will be. Maybe some kind of online Salon des Refusees, or some kind of fringe live theater or old-school film festivals.

[Number6]

The people who will be hurt the most are the background actors. They're the ones who have no lines and populate the crowd scenes. Why pay a bunch of people when you can computer generate them? I think it will take awhile before they're completely replaced but it will not doubt happen.

Computer generated actors will mainly be in the movies for now because TV shows have tighter budgets. TV shows rely more on establishing a relationship between the actors and the viewers than the movies do.

[ZoWie]

Extras have a union too, the Screen Extras' Guild. Some shoots are more unionized than others. Some features use enough union extras to meet agreements, but the rest of the crowd can be anybody. TV usually doesn't use big crowd scenes, and most of the rules in place call for union extras in the foreground only. Note that the disclaimers on a lot of sports tickets (for example) waive the holder's rights to incidental photography. Ditto for shopping malls, etc, and of course for breaking news anything goes. You get on TV and they owe you nothing.

There is indeed no reason whatsoever why crowds can't be animations or machine output. Even before these processes, at some point matte paintings worked just fine. This will indeed make it less likely that a shot will include people who are being compensated. Right now the fear is that they will computer-generate actors' likenesses onto animated or composited footage and pay some stand in a bunch less money to actually do the action. They always had stunt doubles, but now they also do the reverse. If a lead actor looks "too old" in a close shot, they can project over his/her face. There was a big flap about precisely that in one of the Indiana Jones flicks, and the resulting dispute helped cause one of the recent strikes. It put computer generated imagery into everyone's vocabulary.

TV, however, is where the rubber really hits the road on this kind of thing, since production schedules are tighter and budgets are lower. We're potentially looking at a real hit to a lot of TV talent. As we've seen, even hosts are expendable right now. Nothing matters except the bottom line, and showing a profit to the corporate bosses.

Some of us fought the whole idea of corporations running all aspects of work and life, and you see how far we got. Now, game over.