Meet Tilly Norwood. She has wavy brown hair, flawless skin, and an Instagram account where she shares screen tests and behind-the-scenes glimpses of her budding acting career. She posts selfies with captions like “Hey besties” and recently celebrated landing her first on-camera role. To the casual observer scrolling through social media, she appears to be just another Gen Z hopeful trying to break into Hollywood.
There’s just one problem: Tilly Norwood doesn’t exist.
She’s not a person at all, but an AI-generated creation developed by Eline Van Der Velden, founder of the AI production company Particle6 and the AI talent studio Xicoia. And her emergence has ignited a firestorm of anger, anxiety, and outrage across the entertainment industry that shows no signs of dying down.
The controversy exploded when Van Der Velden announced at the Zurich Summit film conference on September 27 that multiple talent agencies were circling her digital creation, with plans to formally sign Tilly for representation in acting roles. The prospect of an AI character being treated like a real actress and potentially taking roles from human performers sent shockwaves through Hollywood, triggering an immediate and visceral backlash from some of the industry’s biggest names.
“That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection,” Emily Blunt told Variety, her words reflecting the deep unease many actors feel about this development.
Other stars were equally horrified. Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner simply commented “Wow… no thanks” on one of Tilly’s Instagram posts. Marvel star Simu Liu took to social media with biting sarcasm: “Movies are great, but you know what would be better is if the characters in them weren’t played by actual humans but by AI replicas approximating human emotion.”
Cameron Cowperthwaite, known for roles in Shameless and American Horror Story, called the project “incredibly thoughtless and frankly disturbing,” adding that he opposed it “in every humanly well… non-humanly possible” way. Ralph Ineson, who appeared in Nosferatu and other films, was even more direct, responding on X with a succinct: “F**k off.”
The Face Behind the Backlash
Tilly Norwood has been active on Instagram since February, building a following by presenting herself as an aspiring actress sharing her journey. Her posts include what appear to be audition tapes, screen tests, and promotional materials. In one recent update, AI Tilly boasted: “In 20 seconds, I battled monsters, escaped explosions, sold you a car, and almost clinched an Oscar. Just another day at… literally Find yourself actress who do it all,” complete with the hashtag #AIActress.
To date, her only actual “performance” is a short comedy sketch titled “AI Commissioner,” which was entirely produced using AI technology and posted to YouTube. In a July interview, Van Der Velden explained that she used ChatGPT to draft and refine the script, then programmed the generated characters with dialogue and guided them through various prompts to perfect their delivery. The entire process took about a month.
The reception to that video foreshadowed the wider Hollywood backlash. “Well… least sketch know they safe from for now,” remarked one YouTube commenter, while another added: “This is so dystopian.”
Van Der Velden’s ambitions for her creation are anything but modest. She has stated publicly that she hopes Tilly will become “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.” At the Zurich Summit, she reportedly told attendees that the entertainment industry’s attitude toward AI has shifted dramatically in just a few months. “Back in February, we were in numerous boardrooms, and everyone was saying, ‘No, this is nothing. It’s not going to happen.’ But by May, people were saying, ‘We need to collaborate with you guys,'” Van Der Velden claimed.
The Union Strikes Back
The most powerful institutional response came from SAG-AFTRA, the union representing over 160,000 actors and performers. The organization issued a withering statement that pulled no punches in its assessment of Tilly Norwood and what she represents.
“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers without permission or compensation,” the statement read. “It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”
The union emphasized that “creativity is, and should remain, human-centered” and condemned the replacement of human performers with what they called “synthetic entities.” They added that AI characters lack “life experience to draw from, no emotion, and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.”
This strong stance from SAG-AFTRA comes just two years after the union’s members endured a grueling 118-day strike in 2023, during which AI protections were a central concern. The agreements reached at the end of that strike included specific protections regarding how major studios and streaming platforms could utilize AI technology in relation to actors’ work and likenesses.
However, those protections cannot prevent independent companies like Particle6 from using AI tools, which are trained on vast amounts of internet data, to produce work that resembles human actors or existing film scenes. The legal landscape remains murky and contested.
Hollywood Heavyweights Weigh In
Beyond the formal union response, individual actors have voiced their concerns in increasingly stark terms. On The View, Oscar-winning actress Whoopi Goldberg articulated what many see as the fundamental unfairness of AI actors.
“You are suddenly up against something that’s been generated with 5,000 other actors. It’s been given all of these… you know, it’s got Bette Davis’ attitude, it’s got this one, it’s got Humphrey Bogart’s humor. So, it’s a little bit of an unfair advantage,” Goldberg explained. Though she added, with characteristic confidence: “But know what? Bring it. Because you can always distinguish them from us.”
Actress Melissa Barrera of the Scream franchise was among those most vocal on social media, writing in an Instagram story: “I hope all actors represented by the agent involved in this, drop their a$$.” Her comment received support from numerous other performers including Collette Nicholas, Alexander Chavez, Kiersey Clemons, and Mara Wilson.
Wilson, known for childhood roles in Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire, made a particularly pointed observation about the nature of AI creation: “You didn’t create. Hundreds real workers real photographers camera operators, heck, even farmers, contributed to this. You appropriated their work and pretended it was yours.”
This criticism strikes at the heart of one of the most contentious issues surrounding generative AI: that these systems are trained on massive datasets of human-created work, often scraped from the internet without permission or compensation to the original creators.
The Creator Responds
Facing an avalanche of criticism, Van Der Velden posted a statement defending her creation on both her own Instagram account and Tilly’s page. Her defense centered on framing Tilly as artistic expression rather than job replacement.
“To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work, a piece of art,” Van Der Velden wrote. “Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.”
She drew comparisons to other technological advances in filmmaking: “Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI have opened new avenues without detracting from live acting, AI presents an additional method for imagining and constructing narratives.”
Van Der Velden argued that “AI characters should be evaluated within their own genre, based on their individual merits, instead of being directly compared to human actors.”
However, this defense has done little to mollify critics who point out fundamental differences between AI-generated characters and traditional animation or CGI. Those techniques, they argue, still require teams of human artists and creators at every stage, whereas AI systems like the ones that produced Tilly Norwood are trained on existing work without compensating the original creators.
A Broader Battle Over AI
The Tilly Norwood controversy is merely the latest skirmish in a much larger war over AI’s role in entertainment. Major media companies have begun pursuing legal action against AI firms for creating content they argue infringes on intellectual property rights.
Disney and Pixar filed a lawsuit against Midjourney in June, claiming the photo and video generator illegally trained its AI on their materials, resulting in unauthorized reproductions of iconic characters like Bart Simpson and Wall-E. Warner Bros. initiated a similar lawsuit against Midjourney earlier this year. These legal battles will likely shape the boundaries of what AI companies can and cannot do with copyrighted material.
Meanwhile, AI technology continues advancing at a breakneck pace. On Monday, OpenAI began notifying agencies and studios that its Sora video generator, which launched on Tuesday with a standalone app, might incorporate copyrighted content unless copyright owners explicitly opt out. The company stated it would actively block AI-generated videos styled after living artists and provide public figures the ability to opt out of having their likeness replicated.
“We’re collaborating with rights holders to understand their options for how their content appears across our ecosystem, including Sora,” said Arjun Sheth, head of media partnerships at OpenAI.
Yet for many in Hollywood, these measures feel inadequate. The ability to opt out places the burden on creators to protect their own work rather than requiring AI companies to obtain permission first. And the technology is advancing so quickly that regulatory frameworks struggle to keep pace.
The UK’s actors and performers union Equity has also joined the backlash against Tilly Norwood, with its Secretary-General calling the AI creation “a computer program has created something fundamentally disconnected from the craft of acting.”
What This Means for the Future
The visceral reaction to Tilly Norwood reveals deep-seated anxiety about AI’s trajectory in entertainment. Actors are not simply worried about losing specific roles, they’re concerned about the devaluation of human artistry itself and a future where their craft might become obsolete.
The economics are troubling. AI characters require no salary, no time off, never age, never get sick, and can theoretically work 24/7 generating content. They don’t require trailers, catering, or insurance. From a purely cost-benefit perspective, they represent enormous savings for production companies, which is precisely what terrifies human performers.
Yet as Whoopi Goldberg noted, there remains something irreplaceable about human performance. Acting draws on lived experience, genuine emotion, spontaneity, and the ineffable chemistry between performers that cannot be replicated by algorithms. The question is whether audiences will care about that distinction or whether they’ll accept increasingly sophisticated AI performances as good enough.
Van Der Velden’s revelation that industry attitudes shifted dramatically between February and May of this year suggests that at least some executives are willing to explore the possibilities. Whether that exploration leads to widespread adoption or remains a niche experiment depends largely on how audiences, creators, and regulators respond.
For now, Tilly Norwood remains more symbol than star, her Instagram presence generating far more controversy than actual work. But she represents a possible future that has Hollywood looking over its shoulder, wondering whether the next generation of performers might not be human at all. And judging by the fury her existence has provoked, that’s a future the entertainment industry is determined to fight.
