Let’s get right down to it. We hate Tilly Norwood. Tilly’s been branded as the first AI actor by her creator, Eline Van der Velden. She’s not an actor. She’s an artificial intelligence that was built on the backs of learning algorithms that have, in turn, pulled from actual people’s works. The fact that she’s going to be in her own upcoming movie changes nothing. All Tilly is doing is performing a task a human could do and taking their job. But Van der Velden would have you believe Tilly is actually creating more jobs.
Creator Claims
According to Van der Velden, “I was in the same boat as everyone else. I saw AI-generated images and videos and was like, wow, this is going to take my business.” Her answer to this was to dive harder into AI. She claims that her studio has now expanded and taken on 40 workers. She states they include actors, producers, and writers. That may very well be true, but for how long? Also, why employ several actors to help build an AI when you could just hire one actor to perform in the film?
In order for AI to function, it has to be trained. There’s nothing to say that Van der Velden didn’t hire people to help train Tilly only to let them go later. That would be the logical thing to do, right? Get your AI up and running and then let it do its thing for current and future projects.
Tilly Norwood Grabs Headlines
Is anyone actually expecting the Tilly movie, Misaligned, to actually be any good? All this is basically just a gimmick. It’s a press-eating, click-baiting, headline that’s succeeding in getting people to talk about something. They’re just making a movie with an AI actress because they can. Then they can show off their technology and, if they’re lucky, make money from it. Then maybe they’ll have enough to pull off the gimmick again in a new way.
The idea of Tilly actually creating more jobs only holds up if the jobs it’s creating are in the tech sector. But that’s not what the claim is. Van der Velden is saying that it will create more jobs for actors and writers. She then claims that Tilly won’t compete for other acting jobs, “because you would never be auditioning against a bot. That’s like saying you’d be auditioning against Elsa from Frozen.” Except that comparison makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Elsa is a computer drawing that can’t be prompted to do anything. She had to be drawn by a human to do something that doesn’t actively exist. That’s not what an AI is.
AI is Not Your Friend
The constant claim that AI is just a “tool” doesn’t hold up under scrutiny most of the time. Tools can allow humans to do things they couldn’t normally do otherwise. Can’t lift a rock? Use a lever and fulcrum. Maybe use a pulley system. A tool still requires human input to use correctly and always will. An AI is trying to take the role of a human out of things as much as possible. When it comes to the arts, that’s just ripping out the soul of creativity.
We hate you, Tilly Norwood. You make us have new appreciation for computer viruses.
