AI actress? More like AI distract-ress… Don’t believe the hype about Tilly Norwood.

If you’re an actor or voice actor or in any way involved in the film industry, you’ve probably seen posts, news and reels about Tilly Norwood over the last few days.

And maybe you’ve panicked about AI “actresses” starting to take jobs from real actors.

Here’s what I think: calm down, it’s going to be okay.

The creator of this product claims that talent agents are “circling” Tilly to sign for representation, but I haven’t seen any statements from agents or producers – or literally anyone else – confirming that this is true.

Let’s see… the company who created a product says in its media release that the product is very popular and will soon be taking the world by storm, because hordes of people are lining up to buy it? That couldn’t possibly be an exaggeration or an outright lie, could it? 🤔

Sure, the tech bros (and chicks) creating these things will probably gain some traction, but they’re not actually any good yet! If you watch the sample video on Tilly’s website…. I don’t think they even bothered quality-checking. The people are not believable, the accents are dodgy, there are spelling mistakes and nonsense text in the posters and documents, and Tilly herself doesn’t look like the same person in several of her photos.

Ya love me ‘cos I’m human.

It’s obvious to me that this whole thing is just a PR stunt. Perhaps a desperate grab for quick funding before anyone looks too closely at the details. Or,  as Imani Vaughn-Jones said in her reel on instagram recently, a piece of social engineering designed to get our brains used to the idea of fake people on our screens – so that when they do get “good enough” and start being used for big media projects, we will no longer think it’s weird or wrong and will happily run along to watch them like good little entertainment lemmings.

Long story short… don’t believe what an AI company says about their own product when there’s no external evidence for what they’re saying.

And more importantly: keep telling production companies and filmmakers the real truth: humans love humans. And that’s what performing arts entertainment is all about.