Hollywood lurched into a fresh wave of existential panic this week after Deadline, notating an otherwise dry industry panel on Saturday, September 27, seized on a stray remark. It came from Eline Van der Velden, the founder of a U.K.-based AI studio called Particle6, who participated in a panel about AI in the entertainment industry at the Zurich Summit, a sidebar to the Zurich International Film Festival. She was there in part to promote the face of her new “AI talent studio,” Tilly Norwood, who debuted in a fully AI-generated short released by Particle6 in July. The synthetic performer looks indistinguishable from the endless Instagram influencers flooding feeds: glossy hair, poreless skin, blinding teeth, eyes fixed in coy detachment upon an otherwise generic face. While Tilly can barely hold a scene, Van der Velden, apparently an actor-comedian turned producer, has been pitching her for stardom. “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,” she told obscure press in July in an interview to promote the short, a comedy sketch titled “AI Commissioner.”
During the Zurich panel last weekend, Van der Velden took the hype up a notch by claiming that there was industry interest in Tilly and that Particle6 had plans to announce “which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months.” That claim was the sort of startup bluster best taken with shakers of salt. But when Deadline called it a “revelation” and published the supposed interest as fact without verification, the resulting headline (which reads, in part, “Talent Agents Circle AI Actress Tilly Norwood”) metastasized into a full-fledged cyberpunk news cycle. By Monday, other trades picked up the story, and by Tuesday, it had grown like wildfire. Variety asked Emily Blunt mid-podcast about Norwood; shown a picture of the avatar, she winced: “Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop taking away our human connection.” Whoopi Goldberg, Melissa Barrera, and others echoed the disgust, and SAG-AFTRA weighed in with a statement condemning the very idea of agencies signing a synthetic performer.
On the representation side, leadership at both WME and Gersh responded by saying their agencies wouldn’t sign Norwood while also acknowledging that, as Gersh president Leslie Siebert put it, “it’s going to keep coming up, and we have to figure out how to deal with it in the proper way.” Sources close to the major agencies all deny participating in any theoretical bidding war to Vulture. In the wake of the backlash, Van der Verden sought to reframe the controversy. “I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a new tool — a new paintbrush,” she wrote in a statement posted on both her own Instagram and one created for Norwood on September 27. “Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI opened fresh possibilities without taking away from live acting, AI offers another way to imagine and build stories.”
If your brain feels like it’s melting, you’re a normal human in good company. What does it mean for an agent to “sign” a synthetic performer? Would that effectively mean repping the studio the way an agency might handle Pikachu by working with the Pokémon Company? And if so, how would that reshape the business model of talent agencies? Beneath that surface lie thornier technical and legal puzzles that may take years to resolve. But what’s clear is that Particle6 and its founder got exactly what anyone peddling a new product wants: attention. So did the larger idea of “synthetic performers,” now fueling a news cycle that sticks a finger deep into one of Hollywood’s deepest anxieties. Startup founders are rewarded for exaggeration, even as the technology itself is just advanced enough to inspire curiosity but nowhere near capable of replacing human craft. That liminal space is a perfect breeding ground for pitchmen and opportunists. (As we speak, OpenAI’s Sam Altman is raising billions on similarly elastic promises.) In that way, Norwood is less a synthetic star in the making than a bellwether or a kind of trial balloon. The footage she appears in is nowhere close to prime-time ready, but the conversation around her cracks open a volatile, uneasy debate around what Hollywood might do when, or if, the technology becomes good enough. What matters isn’t if Van der Velden’s claim of agency interest was true; it’s simply the perception of possibility.
The backlash shouldn’t be dismissed as an overreaction. Generative AI is already well and alive inside Hollywood. Studios are experimenting with it across the production chain; it’s used to accelerate visual effects, digitally retouch actors, and streamline tedious postproduction work (and perhaps eliminate jobs in the process). As my colleague Lila Shapiro found in her reporting over the summer, peace has long been made with the trade-off of cheaper, faster output at the cost of subtlety and craft. “Oh, there’s quality lost,” one VFX artist told her. “But that’s only lost on the people who appreciate it, like fine wine.” Hollywood isn’t alone in its fears, either. The music business recently went through its own panic with Velvet Sundown, an AI-generated band that racked up over a million Spotify streams thanks to algorithmic promotion, a story that underscored how little incentive the platform has to restrict AI music when volume, not artistry, drives its business. (Spotify also recently made policy shifts that indicate it’s embracing AI-generated music, even as it makes a show of combating slop.) Publishing is wobbling through the same churn as AI tools crank out disposable content at scale.
The pattern is always the same: Technology doesn’t have to be good to be disruptive, only viable enough for corporations to monetize. The concern isn’t that Norwood will “land” a role but that the system might be ready to cast her. She exists to probe what audiences will tolerate and to remind Hollywood, already anxious and penny-pinching, that the line between performance and product has never been thinner. The question of AI isn’t just a technical one about what the tools can or can’t do; it’s a political and economic one about how industries choose to use them. Right now, the discourse veers wildly between hype and panic, leaving little space for sober analysis. Founders benefit from exaggeration, corporations from efficiency, and the press from amplification, while the public is left to sort through noise.