There’s a brand new face in Hollywood, generated by AI | USAEMALL.com

At the dawn of this century, Al Pacino starred in “S1m0ne,” a satire about a down-on-his-luck director who creates a computer-generated “star” that conquers Hollywood. Fast forward nearly 25 years, and it appears that real life has caught up with the movies, with the introduction of an AI-generated actress named Tilly Norwood.

News of an AI actress triggered a bit of a Hollywood freak-out about that timeless worry of who gets the part, from Whoopi Goldberg (“Bring it on, because you can always tell them from us”), to Emily Blunt (“Good Lord, we’re screwed”).

Tilly’s creator, Eline van der Velden, says she did not expect the backlash: “No, not at all. But at the same time, I had created her to resonate internationally, right? I had created her to become a global superstar.”

Van der Velden, herself a former actor and comedienne, aimed high because she thinks generative AI is ready for its closeup – saving money, and adding creativity. “I was just trying to educate those industry individuals at that time about what’s possible,” she said.

Bringing Tilly to life took van der Velden’s team some 2,000 iterations. Then, she began to teach her to act. She showed us some early iterations of Tilly emoting. “We were starting to try different emotions with her,” she said. “Here we did some tests. We didn’t think the acting was very good at all.”

“It wasn’t up to your standards?” I asked.

“It was not up to my standards at all!”

In an interview this past July with the British publication Broadcast International, van der Velden made the provocative statement, “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman, that’s the aim of what we’re doing.”

“Yeah, the Scarlett Johansson of the AI genre,” she told us. “I think that was what was missed. There was a lot of misinformation. She’s not meant to take real acting jobs in the traditional film and TV industry. She’s meant to stay in her own AI genre, and that’s where we want her to stay.”

Still, she says her firm has fielded requests for Tilly to appear in a film opposite real actors. “We have said no to any offers,” van der Velden said.

“There’s a difference between pushing the envelope and tearing it up”

Sean Astin is the president of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, where Tilly Norwood has struck a nerve about the state of AI. Asked what Tilly represents to him, Astin replied, “Avatar and character seem like fair labels. Actress, not so much. She – she? It? – simply will not replace our people.”

He says right now in Hollywood artificial intelligence feels like a tsunami: “The onslaught of AI products and AI technology and its uses is, it’s overwhelming. I would just as soon – as citizens and as a union – that we surf the wave, that we surf the wave of incoming stuff.”

For the union, AI protections were a major point of contention in the 2023 strike, and Astin says safeguarding a performer’s name, image and likeness from being harvested without compensation is a top priority going forward. “Eline has every right to use open source, publicly available, legal information to build her creative things,” he said. “My issue and our company’s issue is with the companies that design those systems and scrape the internet and ingest them. They’re not allowed to do that.”

Astin applauds producers who are trying to push the creative envelope using AI. But, he adds, “There’s a difference between pushing the envelope and tearing it up. If you push the envelope, you say, ‘Hey, how can human-centered artistry collaborate with this technology to achieve some communication that feels good to an audience?’ And then there’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, we think it’s cheaper, easier, and you know, we don’t want to hire you as an actor.'”

“Is it a friend, or is it a foe?”

Already, AI-generated scenes have appeared in TV series like Amazon’s “House of David.” There are AI commercials, and over the summer, an AI model appeared in an ad in Vogue magazine for the first time.

For producers, facing ballooning production budgets, AI has triggered a range of emotions. Former entertainment executive Kevin Reilly explains: “Excitement, confusion, fear, trying to figure out how to use this. Is it a friend, or is it a foe?” he said. “It is, in my opinion, very much a friend. It is the most transformative thing that’s happened maybe in the history of Man.”

Reilly is now something of an AI evangelist. He’s the new CEO of Kartel.ai, a Beverly Hills startup that makes AI videos and ad campaigns. “Everything comes with a downside,” he said. “But that is not the reason to just categorically be fearful of this.”

I asked, “How much of this is driven by studios and streaming platforms and brands wanting to just save money?”

“Yeah, I think it’s not necessarily, ‘Hey, we wanna save money,'” said Reilly. “It’s that the bottom line – you know, they are businesses.”

And for businesses, the creative upside can be extraordinary. Kartel wanted to show off a bit, and put generative engineer Fillip Isgro in the driver’s seat. He showed us a concept for a coffee commercial, Cup of Jo. The ad featured multiple versions of … me! It was a little jarring.

He began with an old-fashioned storyboard, building an AI world directed by a human. “What does the coffee shop look like? What does the logo look like? And finally, what do you look like? With your permission, we went on your Instagram and we collected all of your photos.”

That’s all he needed to generate my face. And with just a few commands, Cup of Jo went global, with images of Jo’s Coffee Shop on a barge in the middle of the ocean; on a volcano in Hawaii; and in the Alps.

“The next step in our journey is, we bring it to life,” Isgro said. “We actually bring motion into our stills. I just whip out my iPhone, I record who I need to, and then I can just instantly get the character doing the thing that I need them to do.”

The result: a flashy new ad created in just a couple of days, using no ad agency, no locations, and none of my time.

“Imagine having to go and shoot that. You don’t get that flexibility” in a traditional ad, Isgro said. “And it’s a very planned thing. You have to stick to scripts, and that’s it. But in this world, we can iterate indefinitely without repercussion.”

It’s the story of our time: the tug of war between artificial intelligence (“This tech is here. It’s not gonna go anywhere. How can we use it as a force for good?” asks Eline van der Velden) and humanity (“Artificial intelligence will never replace us, ever,” says Sean Astin) that, for now, is something of a cliffhanger. 

      
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Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Jason Schmidt.

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