Hollywood Is Freaking Out Over A New AI 'Actress,' But This isn't The First Time That's Happened

The history of Hollywood is the history of technology. Whenever a new technology is available, the question of how the film industry might use it is always at the forefront of thoughts. From the transition of cameras going digital to the advancements in CGI effects, Hollywood has been transformed in the past by technology.

So it’s not exactly a shock that every Hollywood studio is trying to figure out how best to implement AI. Using AI to possibly make entire movies is one idea that has certainly been floated, and over the last couple of weeks, the entire industry has been going absolutely nuts over Tilly Norwood, a digital creation that’s being called an AI actress. People are acting like it’s an unprecedented day in Hollywood, but actually, we’ve been here before.

Tilly Norwood Is An AI “Actress”

You’ve almost certainly heard of Tilly Norwood, but you may not actually know what (I hesitate to say “who”) Tilly is. An AI production studio called Particle 6 dropped an entirely AI-generated comedy sketch on YouTube a couple of months ago that introduced an actress called Tilly Norwood. The catch is that Tilly doesn’t exist, but is an AI generation. The video certainly looks impressive from a technical standpoint, even if the "actress" is a bit unnerving.

However, things have gone a step further as talent agencies are reportedly interested in signing the creation, even though, again, Tilly is not a person. The idea here seems to be that Tilly could appear in movies and TV just as any actor could, playing a role, delivering lines, and being otherwise indistinguishable from actual people.

Needless to say, a lot of actual human actors don’t love the idea, and considering that Tilly is little more than a concept at this point, it seems like people are making a big deal over very little (though making a big deal of it all is almost certainly the point). However, this actually isn’t an unprecedented idea. It was tried before, more than 25 years ago.

Before Tilly Norwood There Was Aki Ross

Let's go back a couple of decades to the bygone era of the late 1990s. Video game publisher Square, the company behind the popular Final Fantasy video game series, wanted to get into the movie business. Six years after Pixar created the first entirely computer-animated movie with Toy Story, a movie that, by modern animation standards, looks quite rough, Square Pictures produced Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first photorealistic animated movie.

The voice of Disney's Mulan, Ming-Na Wen, was brought on to voice the film’s lead character, a scientist named Aki Ross. She also did motion capture work for the character in one of the most significant uses of the technology at the time. The film followed Ross and a team of scientists on a post-apocalyptic Earth as they fought a mysterious alien race they called Phantoms.

Square expected Spirits Within to be the first of several photorealistic animated films, as well as the first of many that would include Aki Ross. The thing is, Aki wasn’t only supposed to be a single character. She was supposed to be an actress.

Aki, with Wen behind her, was conceived as the first computer-animated actress, who would appear in different roles in different films in the years to come. It's exactly the same idea that people are discussing with an AI "actress."

In the end, The Spirits Within was incredibly expensive to make, and didn’t succeed nearly as well as it needed to at the box office. The film’s failure ultimately sank the Aki Ross experiment.

The comparisons aren’t perfect, of course. There is, as far as we know, no single person behind the new AI actress. Everything, from the look to the voice, is created by a computer, but the ultimate goal here appears to be the same. In the end, Aki never really had a chance to be what she was designed to be. Time will tell what happens with Tilly Norwood.