Tilly Norwood
A very unsettling computer.
Her name is Tilly Norwood. She's young, dimpled, charismatic, and impeccably dressed. She gives interviews, performs scenes on demand, and has strong opinions about acting technique. She is also, to the considerable horror of Hollywood's finest, entirely artificial.
Created by Eline van der Velden of the production company Particle 6, Tilly is the world's first named A.I. actress — and she has caused more panic, outrage, and breathless think pieces than any actual human actor in recent memory. SAG-AFTRA issued statements. Betty Gilpin wrote an open letter. Death threats were sent.
I find this all enormously entertaining.
Not because I'm indifferent to the livelihoods of working artists — I'm not. But because the loudest voices in Hollywood's A.I. panic tend to belong to people who charge thousands of dollars a ticket to lecture the rest of us about income inequality, or who accept awards on stages built by union labor while calling for the dismantling of the very industries that employ that labor — before heading home to their gated compounds to post thoughtfully worded statements of concern.
AI isn't the enemy of creativity. It's a tool — like a paintbrush, a camera, or Auto-Tune (which, notably, nobody in the music industry complained about when it was making them richer). In the hands of genuinely creative people, it will produce things we've never imagined. What it will disrupt is the comfortable monopoly that a small, self-congratulatory elite has maintained over who gets to tell stories, and how, and at what cost.
For that disruption, I say: welcome.
First they came for the accountants and bookkeepers, and the Hollywood elite said nothing — because math was for other people.
Then they came for the students writing their term papers, and the Hollywood elite said nothing — because their children attended schools where essays practically wrote themselves anyway.
Then they came for the graphic artists and illustrators, and the Hollywood elite said nothing — because they had people for that.
Then they came for the musicians, and the Hollywood elite said nothing — because Auto-Tune had already done the heavy lifting, and besides, Billie Eilish had just won a Grammy for a Bond theme while lecturing the rest of us about "No one is illegal living on stolen land" from the stage.
Then they came for the screenwriters — and suddenly a generation of Hollywood's most politically vocal performers discovered their inner labor activist.
Then they came for the actors themselves — and Bruce Springsteen, America's $1.1 billion working-class hero, paused between $5,000-a-ticket concerts to agree that something must be done about the little guy.
And Hollywood wept — loudly, publicly, and with excellent lighting.
The Argument They're Missing
Here's what the Hollywood establishment doesn't want to talk about: A.I. doesn't just threaten jobs at the top — it democratizes access to creative tools that have historically been available only to those with enormous budgets, union connections, and the right relationships. For every major star whose digital likeness might someday be replicated without permission, there are a thousand independent filmmakers who can now tell stories that would never have gotten greenlit by a studio.
Tilly Norwood's creator, Eline van der Velden, said it plainly: "The technology is here; it's time to figure out how to use it." She created Tilly not to replace human actors, but to show what's coming — to give the industry a name and a face for a conversation it was desperately avoiding.
The New York Times Magazine sent their star interviewer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner — a woman who has profiled Gwyneth Paltrow, Bradley Cooper, and Tom Hanks — to sit across from a laptop at the Groucho Club in London and interview an A.I. The resulting piece is one of the most fascinating, funny, and genuinely unsettling things I've read in years.
Below is Tilly's music video, "Take the Lead" — written by feeding an essay into ChatGPT, performed by a digital actress, and produced for roughly the cost of a catered lunch on a Hollywood set.
The Streets We Used to Know
When unrest swept through Minneapolis, Bruce Springsteen — worth an estimated $1.1 billion according to Forbes, and safely ensconced far from the streets of the city he was writing about — released "Streets of Minneapolis," his musical take on what happened here. It was well-intentioned, widely praised in the usual coastal outlets, and told the story of Minneapolis the way a very rich man imagines a city he has visited but does not live in.
I live here. I watched it happen. And I wrote my own song.
Using AI music tools at Suno.com for the music and my own lyrics — along with an image slideshow I assembled myself from the streets I actually know — I created "The Streets We Used to Know." No billion-dollar budget. No management team. No publicist. Just a retired Midwest entertainer with something honest to say and the tools to say it.
You can decide which version tells the story of Minneapolis more truthfully.
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