AI ‘Actor’ Tilly Norwood Is Becoming a Celebrity Before She Has Even Become an Actor

AI ‘Actor’ Tilly Norwood: Tilly Norwood’s latest contribution to the very strange history of celebrity interviews is switching to Chinese suddenly in Piers Morgan’s interview.

AI ‘Actor’ Tilly Norwood

The AI-generated ‘actress’ appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored alongside veteran actor Tom Conti to seemingly talk about her upcoming movie Misaligned. Everything was going smoothly in a familiar rhythm of an interview while Conti asked a simple question that if the other actors in the film were real performers or computer-generated characters.

Tilly initially answered by talking about human writers, directors and editors involved in the film, while Conti reiterated his question, clarifying it properly, which she eventually seemed to understand, explaining that the other performers were “digital twins” like her.

But mid-conversation, she switched the language and switched the language for some seconds before returning to the conversation casually, as though nothing strange had happened. Morgan understandably noticed and asked Tilly why she started with “Chinese” suddenly. Tilly then apologised and described the incident as a little “hiccup” and casually pointed out that her “wires get crossed”, which was the cause of the said “hiccup”.

It was objectively a very funny moment, but it also accidentally produced the most revealing part of Tilly Norwood’s interview yet because the more Tilly talks, the more interesting the interviews become.

Tilly Norwood Has Become a Celebrity of Sorts

Tilly Norwood has barely had “a chance” to “establish herself” as a screen performer yet she already has something recognisably celebrity-shaped around her.

Tilly has a face, a name, a personality, press tour, film, interviews, carefully constructed accent, voice and even “sense of humour”. She has journalists asking her questions and people arguing whether she is an actress. Now she even has a “viral interview moment”.

That is celebrity culture in its most stripped-down form of getting to see someone’s work before talking about it. Tilly is being introduced to us through the same machinery that usually surrounds actors: interviews, profiles and online discourses before she has actually established the one thing an actor is traditionally expected to do, which is “a performance”.

Her press tour has involved many interviews with journalists, and several of those conversations have already become stories. She was even reportedly seen saying that she is not here to replace anyone.

We have perhaps reached a point where the interview can become the entertainment itself: the actor does not necessarily need to tell us something extraordinary. The existence of the actor becomes the story, and Tilly is apparently taking it seriously.

The Tilly Interviews Are Somehow More Fascinating Than Tilly

Part of the fascination is that every interview seems to expose another strange little thing in the illusion. In a CBS News interview, Tilly was asked about her dream co-actor, and she replied with Leonardo DiCaprio’s name and even made a joke about his younger romantic partners.

Instead of behaving like the endlessly fascinating AI personality, the AI “actor” is marketed as Tilly, who has deflected questions, and complimented the interviewer, which makes you suddenly realise just how much human conversation is built around tiny instinctive reactions.

Then came Piers Morgan’s interview, where she switched language mid-conversation. For a few seconds, the entire idea of the perfectly controlled digital celebrity collapsed into something recognisable: a glitch in the bot.

Who Is Really Being Interviewed?

This is where the story around Tilly becomes more than the new AI actor. When an interviewer asks questions, who is really answering: the model, or the programmers, or the people who designed her personality, or the people who wrote the prompts, or the language model she is based on, or the production company, or someone else?

There has to be a human being somewhere behind every part of this performance, but the entire point of Tilly is that the human being is supposed to disappear, which is different from traditional acting. An actor is also a constructed performance, yes, but there is still a human being inside the performance who has experienced things.

Can AI Actually Act?

The industry has already spent years debating whether AI can generate faces, voices, scripts, environments and performances. Tilly simply makes the question uncomfortable enough to be phrased differently: can something that does not feel really act?

Acting is not simply saying the right words; it is not simply producing the correct expression; not simply crying on cue; not even simply convincing an audience that a character is experiencing something: it involves interpretations.

A performer reads a scene and brings their own understanding of fear, grief, desire, embarrassment, loneliness or love to it. Tilly can generate an expression, but does she feel the expression, or is the emotion the real question?

From AI Actor to AI Celebrity

Something is fascinating about the order in which this is taking place. Usually, an actor acts, then the audience becomes interested, and the interviews follow. However, in the case of Tilly, the celebrity machinery kicked in first.

The discourse arrived with the celebrity while the performance is still being debated, and perhaps that is why the Tilly Norwood phenomenon feels so distinctly of its time. We live in an internet culture where a person can be famous, and influencers can have big careers around the personality online, so perhaps the AI celebrity came at the right time. But the technology seems to have simply removed the person.

There Is Still One Thing Tilly Cannot Answer For Us

The biggest question is not if Tilly Norwood can fool us, but the bigger question is whether fooling us is enough. 

If the audience feels the emotions with the AI performing, perhaps the answer would be eventually yes and perhaps the cinema will decide with time if the origin of a performance matters less than the feeling it creates in person watching it or not.

Surprise! Surprise! Tilly Norwood also has a YouTube channel with a Music Video.

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