Entertainment
AI-generated actor sparks outrage in Hollywood, as creator seeks representation
Like thousands of actors, Tilly Norwood is looking for a Hollywood agent. Her greatest role? Pretending to be human.
That’s because Tilly Norwood is a 100% AI-generated product, created by Dutch producer and comedian Eline Van der Velden, founder of a company named Xicoia, which bills itself as the world’s first artificial intelligence talent studio. Velden pitches her AI creation as the next Scarlet Johansen, and says there are several agents vying to represent it, CBS News’ Jo Ling Kent reported recently.
Since Velden launched the digital character’s prospective career, Tilly Norwood has been all the talk in Hollywood.
But not in a good way. Guilds, actors and filmmakers have met the Xicoia product with an immediate wave of backlash, protesting that artificial intelligence should not have a starring role in the acting profession. In a statement Tuesday, the Screen Actors Guild said that “creativity is, and should remain, human-centered.”
“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” the guild said. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.”
Actor Sean Aston, who starred in “Lord of the Rings” and “The Goonies,” and was recently elected president of sag AFTRA, emphasized how AI Tilly Norwood is an artificial construct.
“You’re made up of stuff that doesn’t belong to you,” he told CBS News. “Let’s just make sure that credit is given where credit is due.”
Van der Velden, who is also the founder of the AI production studio Particle6, promoted Tilly Norwood last month at the Zurich Summit, the industry sidebar of the Zurich Film Festival. It was there that she said talent agencies were circling Norwood and that she expected to soon announce a signing.
Many in Hollywood hope that never happens.
“Any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds,” wrote Natasha Lyonne on Instagram. The “Russian Doll” star is directing a feature titled “Uncanny Valley” that pledges to use “ethical” artificial intelligence in combination with traditional filmmaking techniques. “Deeply misguided & totally disturbed,” she added. “Not the way. Not the vibe. Not the use.”
Artificial intelligence is often used as a tool in film production, though its implementation is hotly debated. It was a major bargaining point in the lengthy strike by SAG-AFTRA that concluded in late 2023 with some safeguards put in place to protect the use of actors’ likenesses and performances by AI. A yearlong strike by video game actors hinged on AI protections. In July, video game actors approved a new contract that mandates employers obtain written permission to create a digital replica.
But there have been numerous controversies over the use of AI in acting. The Oscar-winning 2024 film “The Brutalist” used artificial intelligence for Hungarian dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ characters, the revelation of which prompted debate in the industry.
Van der Velden responded to the stir around Tilly Norwood on Instagram.
“To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work — a piece of art,” Van der Velden said on Sunday. “Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.”
Van der Velden didn’t respond to interview requests Tuesday. In her post, she argued that AI characters should be judged as their own genre.
“Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftsmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance,” she added. “It takes time, skill and iteration to bring such a character to life.”
That statement was also shared on Tilly Norwood’s own Instagram account. Posts include photos of the creation drinking coffee, shopping for clothes and preparing for various projects. As of Tuesday, the account had more than 33,000 followers.
“Had such a blast filming some screen tests recently,” one post reads. “Every day feels like a step closer to the big screen.”
Asked what human actors bring to a performance that AI can’t, Aston, SAG-AFTRA’s Aston said “authenticity,” adding, “You can fall in love. Your parents can die. You can you can be in some terrifying situation. The sum of all of our emotional experiences in our life, artificial intelligence can approximate it — it is not real.”
Entertainment
Anne Hathaway shares major news about ‘Princess Diaries 3’
Anne Hathaway is ready to wear her crown again as Queen Mia of Genovia.
The Oscar-winning actress has given a major update on Princess Diaries 3 in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, confirming that a new installment is actively in the works 22 years after Princess Diaries 2.
“One hundred percent, we’re constantly working on it,” she said, revealing that development briefly took a backseat while filming The Devil Wears Prada 2 — another of Hathaway’s highly-anticipated sequels, which hits theatres on May 1.
“[Devil Wears Prada 2] cropped up unexpectedly and took over the space,” Hathaway explained, adding that it became impossible to focus on both projects at once. But now, the plan is clearer.
“The intention is to make Princess Diaries hopefully next,” she declared, noting that the film “is not greenlit or confirmed yet.”
Still, the demand is undeniable. But Hathaway acknowledged that “everybody wants it,” she and her TDWP costar Meryl Streep emphasised that “you’ve got to wait for the right script.”
The original Princess Diaries released in 2001 introduces Mia Thermopolis, a regular teenager who discovers she’s heir to a kingdom — a role that turned Hathaway into a household name.
Looking back at the film, Hathaway tearfully told People magazine, “This is the role that changed my life. And I’m standing with Julie Andrews, which is just insane.”
Entertainment
Donnie Wahlberg shares emotional moments with “Boston Blue” cast after show was renewed
Entertainment
Nasa unveils new space telescope to probe mysteries of ‘dark energy’
Nasa unveiled a new telescope on Tuesday to scan vast swathes of the universe for planets outside our solar system and probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
The Roman space telescope is expected to discover tens of thousands of planets, possibly offering clarity about how many could be out there.
“Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe,” Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman told a news conference at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, where the telescope went on display.
The 12-metre (39-feet), silvery contraption with massive solar panels will be transported to Florida ahead of a launch into space aboard a SpaceX rocket planned for September at the earliest.
Roman, which took more than $4 billion and over a decade to build, is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, nicknamed the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in developing the landmark space telescope.
Thirty-six years after Hubble launched into space, revolutionising astronomical observations, Nasa hopes Roman will help to shed light on questions that remain unresolved.
Boasting a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, the telescope will sweep across vast regions of space from its position 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) from Earth.
The telescope will send 11 terabytes of data a day down to Earth, said Mark Melton, a systems engineer at Goddard Space Flight Centre.
“In the first year, we’ll have sent down more data than Hubble will have for its entire life,” he told AFP.
The telescope’s wide-angle lens will allow Nasa to conduct a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate.
“Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets outside our solar system. It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae and tens of billions of stars,” she said.
This wealth of information will enable Nasa to tease out areas of interest that can then be investigated by complementary telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
Study the invisible
But Roman will also study the invisible — dark matter and dark energy, whose origins remain unknown but which are thought to constitute 95% of our universe.
Dark matter is believed to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by making the universe expand faster and faster over time.
Thanks to its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted by celestial bodies billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time to hopefully discover more about the two phenomena.
Complementing the work of Europe’s Euclid space telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, Roman will probe “how the dark matter structures itself throughout cosmic time” and “calculate how fast galaxies are moving away from us,” Darryl Seligman, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, told AFP.
These discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of our universe, said astrophysicist Julie McEnery, who led the Roman project.
“If Roman wins a Nobel Prize at some point, it’s probably for something we haven’t even thought about or questioned yet,” said Melton.
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