TECH NEWS – Recent developments in artificial intelligence are somewhat frightening, or at least divisive.

Meet Tilly Norwood, the AI actress who already embodies more anthropomorphism than most audiences are comfortable with. She first appeared in a comedy sketch called AI Commissioner. While some might dismiss it as silly, her creators have much bigger ambitions: they want Tilly to become the next big star. The so-called code homunculus Tilly Norwood is produced by Xicoia, a studio spun off from the AI production company Particle6 and led by producer Eline Van der Velden.

At the Zurich Film Festival, Van der Velden explained that when Tilly was first introduced, people constantly asked what she was, and now the team is preparing to announce which agency will represent her in the coming months. According to Van der Velden, “there’s already a kind of Tilly mania in Hollywood”, and producers are eager to work with her in some form. We’ll believe it when it actually happens.

The claim that “everyone is excited about what I’m selling” is hardly proof that AI actors will soon dominate our favorite shows. If the AI Commissioner sketch reveals anything, it’s that there’s still a long road ahead before these creations stop appearing eerie and unsettling. The voices are strange and sometimes rigid, and every exaggerated mouth movement gives the impression that the “actor’s” skeleton is about to burst out of its body. Real actors don’t behave this way — and if they did, they’d have unnaturally flexible faces and skeletons, which is physically impossible.

On LinkedIn, Van der Velden wrote that “audiences care about the story, not whether the star is alive”, adding that artificial intelligence could help solve the problem of shrinking budgets and rising content demand. “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman — that’s the goal,” she told Broadcast International.

They might have set the bar a little too high.

Source: PCGamer, Variety, LinkedIn, Broadcast International