The industry should refuse to work with these uncanny figures, which plagiarise the performances of generations of actors
What is scary about “Tilly Norwood”, the new AI-generated screen star created by the digital studio Xicoia, and launched in a pre-emptively ironic comedy video mocking the soulless unoriginality of AI, is how very convincing it looks in all its girl-next-door cheerfulness. I was expecting something like those Stepford-Wife AI language tutors that crop up on your Instagram feed, promising to practise German or Spanish or French with you. But it has to be said: “Tilly” is like an iPhone 17 making those faces look like a Nokia brick. It is not on screen for long and perhaps vanishes just before you sense something’s off, but as things stand, “Tilly” doesn’t look obviously less real than many of the performers who appear on screen today.
It is not merely that the technology which creates these unreal figures gets relentlessly better and better – the creators of “Tilly” have in effect plagiarised a million style and performance touches from legions of actors who once sweated real blood to make a success of them. It’s also that the aesthetics of real-world performance and writing are themselves getting more and more programmatic, blandifying downwards to meet the robot’s existence halfway and create a seamless uncanny-valley context in which it can thrive. It is not merely a question of the aesthetics of female beauty (created by an overwhelmingly male army of coders and tech bros), but an aesthetics of everything on the screen.
