The UK’s actors and performers union Equity has joined the backlash against AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood.
Equity General Secretary Paul W Fleming said on Thursday that the creation of Tilly Norwood and news over the weekend that talent agents were looking to sign the AI character was part of a larger worrying phenomenon.
“A computer program has created something fundamentally disconnected from the work of acting, the craft of acting, but also the soul of a human being, and that’s why people engage with entertainment, engage with the performing arts, to engage with human beings,” he told Sky News. “It’s a very, very strange phenomenon.”
Digging in deeper to the issue, Fleming said a major concern for Equity was the source of the original material used by the AI tool to create characters such as Tilly Norwood.
“We’re at the stage in AI where so much data has been used. It’s gone through several processes, and the original source becomes more and more unclear,” he said. “That’s something that should worry every viewer, every working person because that’s not really the way our data should be being used. That’s not really the way our work should be being used.
“We as a union have been looking at using things like gdpr, general data protection regulations, to make demands of companies to find out where the data that goes into these creatures, these bits of technology come from. To make sure that there isn’t an abuse of our members’ work,” he added.
Actor, comedian and technologist Eline Van der Velden revealed in a panel at the industry-focused Zurich Summit on Saturday that she was in talks with a number of talent agents interested in signing her AI-generated creation, actress Tilly Norwood.
Following Deadline’s newsbreak on Saturday, a host of actors, led by the likes of Melissa Barrera and Kiersey Clemons, publicly voiced their anger over the potential development, with Whoopi Goldberg and Emily Blunt among those to have waded in since.
Hollywood’s powerful actors union SAG-AFTRA responded to the news with a statement on Monday saying it was “opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.:
The union previously secured protections for actors’ likenesses and performances against AI, in the wake of the 2023 actors strike, sparked by a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
Van der Velden, who works under the banner of her AI-focused production company Particle 6, and has also just unveiled AI talent studio Xicoia, soft-launched Tilly Norwood on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube over the summer.