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Jameela Jamil has condemned the use of AI in the entertainment industry with The Good Place star calling AI-created actress Tilly Norwood “deeply disturbing and troubling.” Speaking at an intimate press conference at the annual tech conference Web Summit in Lisbon, the British actress and activist didn’t hold back when asked how she feels Hollywood should embrace the new AI technology that is slowly infiltrating the business. “I can’t understand it in the television and film space because the whole point of acting is to emulate the human experience and so having something that is not human trying to emulate our experience is not possible,” she said. “I find it deeply disturbing and troubling and shame on the agencies that sign these actresses.” Commenting specifically on the advent of Tilly Norwood, who has sparked a much needed debate about the use of AI in Hollywood since she launched at the Zurich Summit in September, Jamil said: “Shame on it being a teenage-looking girl who can’t say no to a type of sex scene or to a sexual abuse scene, who can’t advocate for herself, who can’t advocate for more money. It’s marked that it was a young woman, rather than a man that they came out with first and that she looks a particular way. I find the whole thing deeply disturbing.” She admitted that while she felt there were certain situations where AI could benefit society – notably in the medical sector – she felt that the tech has no place in art and culture. “When it comes to art or things that are fundamentally human, there’s no place for something that has been coded by some greedy psychopath in Silicon Valley,” she said. (Tilly Norwood was, in fact, created by a London-based woman – Eline Van Der Velden who heads up AI production company Particle6). Jamil stressed that she feared for film and television crews, pointing to the “incredible, innovative and interesting work” that costume designers, production designers and makeup artists do on sets. “I can’t think of anything sadder than replacing these people and these departments with a computer by someone who isn’t an artist,” she said. “I hope to never have to engage with it.” Jamil added that she refuses to use AI in any way, stressing she was wary of data protection and privacy. “I don’t have it in my house,” she said. “I don’t know what it is listening to and I don’t know what it is going to do with that information. I find it very scary that it saves your data. I find it very worrying that there are certain open-source elements that mean that someone else might be able to track your conversations with AI.” She continued: “I think it’s robbing us of our autonomy. I think it’s robbing us of our self-confidence. I think that we don’t pay attention to who is funding AI so therefore we don’t which way the information or data is leaning. So, I just think we have to have immense guardrails around it and we have to make sure that the people we have in charge of this beast that is going to destroy our planet have some semblance of care for humanity and I haven’t yet seen that already demonstrated.”
