This seems to be the only official video on YouTube of the AI actress, Tilly Norwood. There are more short clips on her instagram. But Norwood isn't the only artificial feature of the above video; everyone you see in the video is AI generated. It's written by AI and I assume the voices are AI generated as well. I'm trying to pick out the patterns that indicate AI writing and one thing I can see is that it's very dreamlike. It's like a dream in which everything makes sense while you're in it but if think for a moment you realise things don't add up. For example, when Norwood, in the video, apparently on a red carpet, says, "Three seasons and a podcast." Three seasons of what? What podcast is she talking about? The company behind the video and Norwood have said nothing about a podcast or series.
Naturally, SAG-AFTRA is on its ear about Norwood. I don't foresee AI performers replacing real ones in the near future but I can imagine them becoming a phenomenon unto themselves. Virtual YouTubers are popular throughout Asia and those are real people using artificial images, essentially like puppets. I can easily imagine totally artificial YouTubers cornering a market.
Yet the writing feels disconnected. Like a lot of people, I've been wondering if Disney has been sneaking AI writing into their productions. I was watching Alien: Earth last night, the fourth episode, and there was a decent scene in which Wendy, the protagonist, is in an operating room and we find out she can hear and repeat the language of the aliens. It's basically a reworking of an idea from Alien: Resurrection but it's not so bad. But it's followed by a scene between her and her brother which strongly reminded me of Ahsoka. The performers spend an inordinate amount of time delivering peculiarly flat dialogue. Wendy asks her brother where he was while she was in the hospital and he assures her that he would have come if he'd known where she was. Is there a reason she'd suspect he wouldn't? Is there a reason we linger on him assuring her? It seems like no. Nothing here is to introduce character nuance or depth but to fill time in a sort of theoretical way, like something or someone is focused more on convincingly creating an actual television scene than on creating or expressing something interesting. I'm not sure if this is Disney employing AI or if the screenwriters actually wrote a few interesting scenes and then just had some software fill in the gaps. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned bad writing.
Let's imagine Tilly Norwood becomes a sensation. I think conversation will quickly become about ethical considerations. It would be possible to depict Norwood doing or saying things no human actress would do. The video above even already has a joke about ignoring consent. I certainly don't think Particle6 is going to be able to stop the creation of unauthorised Tilly Norwood porn. I wonder if the conversation will shift to focus on what people compulsively watch. To what new depths of depravity will AI take us?
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