Simulated starlet lacks real appeal

Opinion

It’s an old story, one we’ve been telling ever since starlets were discovered at soda fountains.

A pretty young woman comes to Hollywood, with her glossy eight-by-10 headshots and her dreams. She’s had a few bit parts and she’s looking for an agent. She wants to make it big in pictures. She wants to be a star.

That’s Tilly Norwood in 2025.

Except that Tilly’s not real. She’s an AI creation, digitally manufactured by Dutch actor, comedian and producer Eline van der Velden.

The London-based van der Velden has created Tilly as a 20-something brunette with creamy skin and a light smattering of freckles across her nose. There’s a bit of Lily Collins there, a suggestion of Ana de Armas, maybe a touch of the young Carey Mulligan. Her voice is British-accented but not too posh.

Tilly gives off a relatable, girl-next-door vibe, but she’s versatile. Her demo reel shows she can be a fierce monster-fighter, a sad princess, a capable law-enforcement officer, a modern woman in the big city. She can cry on demand.

Her social media accounts (#futureoffilm) picture her relaxing on a beach, sitting at a Paris café table and appearing at a press junket with a self-deprecating smile.

Van der Velden has announced that she’s shopping around for an agent — a real, live human agent from an actual, live human agency — for her new AI performer. “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman. That’s the aim of what we’re doing,” she’s said.

At least that’s what van der Velden said until the fast and furious backlash, not just from actors but from fans. Now she insists that Tilly is “not a replacement for a human being.” She’s meant to be a creative, conceptual work, a filmmaking tool, maybe “a piece of art.”

It’s true that during the age of the Hollywood studio system, stars were “manufactured.” Their looks were transformed, their voices fine-tuned. They were given new names and made-up backstories.

It doesn’t feel like an accident that Tilly Norwood is an ingenue, a seemingly malleable young female of the kind the entertainment industry has too often seen as interchangeable and disposable. But designing a “screen-ready AI actress,” as van der Velden calls Tilly, goes beyond a little strategic artifice to outright inhumanity.

And it doesn’t seem sustainable, somehow. Sure, we might like our celebrities to be impossibly gorgeous and glamorous — as Tilly is — but we also gobble up “Stars — They’re Just Like Us!” features in the gossip rags. We’re always looking for those banal moments, those little flaws, those glints of vulnerability that tell us Hollywood folks are human, too. And how can they feel human if they’re not, you know, human?

In a LinkedIn post from last month, van der Velden offers a dissenting view. “Audiences? They care about the story — not whether the star has a pulse,” she confidently asserts. “Tilly is already attracting interest from talent agencies and fans. The age of synthetic actors isn’t ‘coming’ — it’s here.”

I can’t help but feel that van der Velden is drastically underestimating the pro-pulse section of the viewing audience, but she seems determined to press on, as we see in a promotional video — all AI-generated, of course — released by her tech-focused production company, Particle 6.

In this two-minute short, meant to be comic and “playful,” employees at a fictional British production company, while admitting that TV is basically dead, hope to squeeze in “one last development meeting.” They pitch a cute sitcom idea, but it’s rejected. Fortunately, we’re told, “AI generated a hundred better ideas in minutes, perfectly aligned to channel data, viewing figures and optimized audience.“

The video then introduces us to its new “100 per cent AI-generated star,” Tilly.

“Like if a Sunday roast went to drama school and got BAFTA optimized,” comments one sardonic employee (who is, ironically, also AI-generated). “She’ll do anything I say — I’m already in love!” quips a director. (Wow, yeah, hilarious. Like, not creepy at all.)

The video is meant to be funny, but it’s the worst kind of joking-not-joking comedy, and it comes off as cynical and disingenuous as van der Velden tries to inoculate her project against criticism by bringing up all the criticisms herself. “We’re all going to hell,” laughs one hapless (non-human) human near the end, as she contemplates the future of AI-generated entertainment.

See, the video seems to say, we get it! We understand that we’re basically bringing a Black Mirror episode to life! We get how sinister it is to use surveillance of people’s consumption habits to produce algorithmically ordained entertainment, to churn out AI content that can “be clipped, subtitled and monetized on TikTok by lunchtime” for “less than the catering budget of The Bear.” We’re in on the gag!

Nevertheless, serious concerns lurk at the edges of the Tilly phenomenon. For people in the industry, there are the ethical issues that arise from using AI models trained on and created from the faces, expressions, gestures and voices of real actors.

For viewers, there’s the problem of movies and shows that have been tested, engineered and optimized to give audiences exactly what they want. Tilly feels a mathematically-calibrated fusion of the top female stars of the last decade: She’s beautiful but fatally generic.

Not to sound like a Twilight Zone twist ending here, but getting exactly what you want eventually ends up being dull. What we need from TV and movies is something a little unexpected, and that includes the idiosyncrasies, imperfections and unpredictabilities of human stars.

What Tilly and her creator offer isn’t art. It’s just kitsch.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca