Video of the Week: Tilly Norwood by Particle6

What was it like, do you imagine, when the Luddites first saw the Spinning Jenny? How visceral was the reaction of the navigators as train tracks were lain alongside their canals?

You don't have to imagine anymore - you can just see what actors (joined by many other creatives who see this as the canary flying into their own coalmine) have said about Tilly Norwood. As you can see from the Video of the Week (VOTW) above, she's a pretty unassuming mid-20's 'talent' in the midst of being pushed hard as the Next Big Thing.

In reality, she has no reality - she's an AI that is causing all manner of humans, renowned for controlling their emotions on film (Emily Blunt, the entire actors' union Sag-Aftra for example), to lose their collective shit. Following Tilly's unveiling at the Zurich Film Festival, much print and airtime was also devoted to collective pearl-clutching and hand-wringing about how this is the end of acting.

Glorious self-interest is, of course, a natural human trait that has propelled billions to try and protect their particular specialism (cf the fossil fuel industry v renewables, cab drivers v Uber, record labels v Apple Music) almost always headlining the observable negatives versus the yet-to-be-experienced positives. Of course we still want to see Jeremy Allen White moodily mooching about Chicago as 1982 Springsteen in 'Deliver Me From Nowhere' or Blunt herself in 'The Smashing Machine' with The Rock - and we still will. Acting isn't dying, just like musicianship didn't die with the synthesiser and electric guitar.

Instead, many other people will be able to express their creative ideas without having to be hamstrung by super-expensive humans. They won't have to distribute via ruthlessly choosy film studios. Those things will still go on and will still be adored or hated as before. But you can't halt the march of progress, just because you don't like this particular tech as opposed to one that came before.

The real analogy is, of course, between a film actor and a stage actor. When the movies and the talkies started to take hold with the incredible inventions associated with cinema, I imagine the (real?) actors in (real?) theatres were absolutely livid. Why would punters go to a variable-quality, awkwardly-staged play when they could watch a script-perfect film shot in beautiful locations that truly transported you from your mundane existence? With popcorn??

CGI already decorates these films to make the aforementioned actors and their films better. Distribution via streaming platforms enables them to reach different audiences too. They have - as have we all - benefitted handsomely from advances in technology, but it only seems like the ones that don't play into their wallets positively that are found to be 'the end of acting.'

I, for one, can't wait to see the first AI full-length film. It doesn't matter if it stars Tilly Norwood or anyone else - because I know that the level of human expertise required to produce something like it will be extraordinary.