She looks like a movie star, doesn’t age and doesn’t need a lunch break: Hollywood’s ideal girl has officially gone digital.
Tilly Norwood is not a real person. She is created entirely from artificial intelligence (AI) by Dutch comedian and actress Eline Van der Velden. A blend of Ana de Armas, Madison Beer and Emilia Clarke, the social media account Impact described her as the entertainment industry’s “dream actress: ageless, can’t give consent and has no agency.” Van der Velden’s company, Xicoia, presented her at the Zurich Film Festival on Sept. 28.
The announcement that Tilly was about to be signed by a talent agency caused strong online pushback from Hollywood actors like Lucy Hale, Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Abigail Breslin. Many shared the concern that Tilly is sculpted by eurocentric ideals of women to be young, flawless and passive in the face of objectification. One TikTok user, @smartfella, called it a “Black Mirror episode in real life.”
Mara Wilson, star of Matilda, asked in an instagram comment, “What about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?”
Van der Velden has not backed down from her stance that Tilly is a work of art. She posted a statement on Instagram saying, “Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftsmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance.”
Tilly Norwood is part of a growing trend of AI-generated influencers and models. Amid the controversy, Van der Velden shared that she intends to create at least 40 AI actors with her company, Xicoia.
“We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman — that’s the aim of what we’re doing,” she stated in an interview.
SAG-AFTRA, an American labor union that represents around 160,000 television and film actors, released this statement: “The union 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 trained on the work of countless professional performers, without permission or compensation.”
In 2023, SAG-AFTRA went on strike over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The main cause was studios seeking to scan the images and voices of extras to create digital replicas, which could then be used in future projects without consent or fair compensation.
It was the longest actors strike against the film and TV studios in Hollywood history, taking place from July 14 to Nov. 9.
Emily Colyer, freshman at the University of Miami, said, “I thought the entire point of acting is to portray the human experience… It’s bad media and it doesn’t even look good.”
Emily Blunt, British actress, told Variety, “Good Lord, we’re screwed.”