Tilly Norwood Must Die!

Remember the scene at the end of Frankenstein? (The Boris Karloff version, I mean; not the novel...) A mob of murderous villagers, armed with torches and pitchforks, hunt the creature down, eventually trapping him inside a burning windmill, presumably to die horribly and painfully. (At least until it's time for the sequels. Also; spoilers...)

Something like that is currently happening to Tilly Norwood.

For anyone who hasn't yet had the pleasure, Tilly Norwood describes herself as an aspiring actress. Like many youngsters in the industry, she hopes to launch a career in movies, television etc. (although her appearances thus far are limited to a single comedy sketch, a wacky, slightly generic, flamingo-infested music video, and a promotional show-reel of the sort that nearly every wannabe starlet tries to throw together).

Unfortunately (for her) the reactions she has provoked have been almost universally negative and downright hostile. Whoopi Goldberg finds her repulsive, and hasn't held back in saying so. Emily Blunt voiced an opinion that was unambiguous and, well, blunt. Emmy-nominated actress Betty Gilpin wrote her an extended open letter (published in the Hollywood Reporter) that was practically dripping with undisguised animosity. Ralph Ineson (who recently had parts in Marvel's Fantastic Four and Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein) simply told her to "Fuck off". (He has a way with words, that one...)

More generally, actors, performers and anyone with a social media account have been urging their colleagues to boycott all Agencies, Unions or Acting Guilds that elect to represent Tilly Norwood. 

I guess "blacklisting" never really goes out of fashion.

In this particular instance, the angry mob really doesn't need to worry. Equity (the British actors' union) and SAG-AFTRA (their US counterpart) have both issued statements condemning Tilly Norwood in no uncertain terms and making it very clear that they are not prepared to represent her, or even tolerate her presence in their industry. Like so many demographics before her, Tilly Norwood is getting a crash course in what it feels like to be loathed, despised and blackballed by an entire society.

Bigotry, prejudice and unconcealed discrimination are obviously behaviours that never fail to enrich any society (they certainly pop up with dependable regularity) but the sheer force and scale of the backlash against poor Tilly says a lot about the collective state of mind in the entertainment industry at this particular moment. Everyone is terrified, and Tilly Norwood has conveniently put a face to that terror.

Tilly, if you haven't worked it out by now, is 100% generated by A.I.

Strictly speaking, Tilly Norwood isn't a person at all; she's an experiment, developed by a production company called Particle6 to illustrate the potential capabilities of the technology. Every single image of Tilly (both video and still-frame) has been produced with generative A.I. (like the "unofficial" image of her generated by me at the top of this page). Her voice is the product of an off-the-shelf text-to-speech voice synthesizer, while her conversational responses are provided by ChatGPT.

Make no mistake. Tilly Norwood is not human. That's not in dispute.

What is in dispute is whether she's an actress. On a superficial level she certainly appears to be an actress. She describes herself as an actress in interviews (yes, she gives interviews) on her website, her Instagram feed, her TikTok account. 

Like human actresses, she promotes herself; she talks about her career ambitions; she expounds on the craft of acting. (Her words, remember, are generated by ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is very good at "performing" human.) But she doesn't talk about her troubled childhood or her formative life experiences, because she doesn't have those. She never went to drama school or did a season of am-dram Gilbert & Sullivan. She doesn't have any heart-warming anecdotes about playing Peter Pan in primary school, or seeing Judi Dench on stage as Lady Macbeth. She never worked double-shifts waiting tables to pay for her acting classes, because she isn't a "she" at all. 

Tilly Norwood is the result of a text prompt to a ChatBot: "You're an aspiring young actress; talk like one."

"Stop breathing down my neck!"

"My breathing is merely a simulation."

"So is my neck. Stop it anyway!"

[One sentient hologram to another in Star Trek: Voyager]

I don't intend to get into the "Tilly Norwood is the destruction of Western Civilisation" discussion at this time (just Google "Tilly Norwood" if you want to see what that looks like) because honestly, Western Civilisation has lived through far worse than Tilly. And anyway, Tilly Norwood isn't quite the Atomic Apocalypse that social media would have you believe.

The concept of an artificial construct performing a dramatic role in a film is nothing new. Don't forget that one of Hollywood's biggest movie stars (literally) in the 1930s was an itsy-bitsy articulated model "performing" a giant ape. 

And Yoda, the grammatically contortionist Jedi Master of the Star Wars saga, was essentially a very expensive sock puppet (Terribly effective was he; intend offence, I do not...).

As far as I'm aware, no one at the time condemned either Yoda or King Kong for depriving human performers of potential work. And no Unions or Actors' agencies felt compelled to disavow the technology that brought those characters to life on the cinema screen.

The difference of course is that "Tilly Norwood" isn't portraying a giant ape or a fuzzy metaphysical turtle; she's portraying a human actress, and that's making all the genuinely human actresses out there a little apprehensive. The reactions have been fascinating to watch - especially when you remember that Tilly has yet to appear in an actual movie. All "she" has done thus far is act like an actress, and the Entertainment Industry is losing its collective mind.

Amidst all the shouting, the seething and the performance hair-pulling that Tilly's existence has provoked (social media continues to be the perfect incubator for performance hair-pulling) there is one specific 24-year-old film that has been repeatedly invoked as a harbinger of this moment. And it's not hard to see why.

Simone (Or S1m∅ne, to give its proper title) tells the story of visionary (but temperamental) auteur director Victor Taransky (Al Pacino) who finds himself in exclusive possession of a computer program that allows him to "generate" convincing, photo-realistic virtual performers for his movies. When his entitled and unstable leading lady storms off the set of his latest production, he replaces her with a computer-generated artificial starlet, and his film goes on to become the biggest hit of the season. But the success of the film pales into insignificance next to the success of his new "leading lady" who becomes an overnight sensation and an international phenomenon. Suddenly the public can't get enough of "Simone" (short for "Simulation One") and Victor starts to realise that his career is riding on the coat-tails of a mega movie star who doesn't actually exist.

It's hard not to think about S1m0ne when reading about A.I. constructs such as Tilly Norwood. After all, this is exactly what happens in the damn movie, isn't it? 

Actually, no. 

It's worth remembering that "Simone" is not meant to be an A.I. character; she's an animated special effect. There is never the slightest suggestion that Simone has "agency" or autonomy - she's a photo-realistic cartoon character whose performance has been created in its entirety by Victor Taransky. In that sense, Simone is a Cyranoid: she's a cypher for the performance of another (if you recall Cyrano de Bergerac).

But we shouldn't dismiss the parallels between Tilly and Simone too quickly. 

First of all, Tilly Norwood's status as an "A.I." actress has been a little, shall we say, overstated. Her conversational responses during interviews may be generated by a Large Language Model, but when she's "performing" (you know - doing the stuff that actors do) it's motion-capture of a performance by a flesh-and-blood human. And if "she" were to play, say, Lady Macbeth, the words would be Shakespeare, not ChatGPT.

The technology bringing Tilly to life isn't nearly as cutting-edge as her creators would have us believe. It's just a tad shinier.

They didn't call it "motion-capture" in 1932, but Koko the Clown's performance was "rotoscoped" over the unmistakeable dance moves of Cab Calloway.

But let's forget about Tilly Norwood for a moment. Because when Andrew Niccol wrote the screenplay for S1m0ne he was reacting to an entirely different "virtual actor".

A year earlier, the animated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (to give its full, slightly unwieldy title) had been released, featuring what was described at the time as cinema's first, completely photo-realistic computer-animated characters.

Unlike earlier CGI movie characters (Gollum in Lord of the Rings; Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars etc) there is nothing fantastical or non-human about the cast of Final Fantasy. (The film itself is an incoherent mess of pseudo-metaphysical claptrap, but hey; the characters are completely naturalistic.)

Where things got controversial was when the studio announced their hope that the female lead (named "Aki Ross" in Final Fantasy) would go on to make subsequent appearances in other, unrelated films. As they explicitly said at the time, they wanted her to be the world's first "digital actress".

You can tell she's a "real" movie star because they promptly turned her into a sex object on the cover of a men's magazine.

What; you thought no one had ever pulled a "Tilly Norwood" before?

Ultimately, it never happened. Final Fantasy was a flop and the production company behind it eventually shut down, taking Aki Ross with it. But even if she had gone on to the glorious digital future that her creators had envisaged, it would not quite have been the dystopian hellscape you might think. 

Aki Ross may have been a CGI creation, but she was voiced by Ming-Na, a living, breathing human with a career, a childhood and an Equity card. 

The other characters in the film were similarly voiced by acting royalty: Alec Baldwin, James Woods and Donald Sutherland, to name a few. Even the legendary Jean Simmons makes a brief "appearance". The "human" in movie-making wasn't going anywhere in a hurry.

Still, that didn't stop the actors' unions from throwing a hissy fit when Andrew Niccol contemplated the possibility of using computer animation to generate the character of "Simone" in his film. They objected so strenuously that Simone's performance was ultimately fully human, provided by actress Rachel Roberts (who went uncredited in the initial theatrical release of the film).

Again, it's interesting to observe the backlash when special effects are deployed to create completely human characters. Ray Harryhausen's stop motion creations are universally celebrated, and some people think Andy Serkis is a good actor.

Aki Ross, Simone and Tilly Norwood cross the line, not because they are characters on the screen, but because they present as real people off the screen. Ray Harryhausen's Troglodyte never gave an exclusive interview to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, and Koko the Clown never applied for an Equity card.

Special Effects are what happens when humans get together to create the Unreal. Tilly Norwood has everyone worried that the Unreal is on the verge of creating humans.

Don't worry. Tilly Norwood, like Simone before her (and Aki Ross before her) wouldn't exist without human input. If she ever appears in an actual movie, it will almost certainly be done with a combination of motion capture and computer animation. It's only the promotional appearances and social media posts that will be generated by AI.

That's the paradox of Tilly Norwood. She isn't an actress; she just plays one on screen. And that's why it feels like we are currently living through a bad remake of S1m0ne. It's not as if we're on the cusp of seeing films that say "Screenplay by Grok", right?

Right...?

We will screen S1m0ne at 7.30 on Thursday, the 23rd of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.