Actors dream of that career-defining role which pushes them onto the global stage. But imagine you get the part, and instead of acting with fellow humans, you find yourself adrift before blue screens, interacting with invisible characters who will be rendered in post-production. The dream, it seems, is a mirage. There is no acting, just imagining. No fellow human beings, merely AI actors.

Well, with the unveiling of Tilly Norwood, this could become reality. She’s the first creation to come from AI talent studio Xicoia and actors have voiced their concern online. “Hope all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a$$. How gross, read the room,” wrote actress Melissa Barrera. In defence, creator Eline Van der Velden posted a bland justification for Tilly Norwood, itself suspiciously AI-sounding. “She [Norwood] is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art,” Van der Velden wrote. “Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.”

The idea of an AI actor playing a human character is absurd. It detracts from the whole concept of acting, which is to convey the wide array of human emotion and tell a story that people find compelling. AI actors would bring nothing new given that they have no lived experience; like LLMs, they are parasitical, stealing likenesses without permission. And yet talent agencies are reportedly interested in representing her.

On the face of it, you would think that Norwood could only play meta roles, drawing attention to her AI nature. Even when a humanoid is depicted in films such as Ex Machina or Blade Runner, human actors convey the uncanny sense that these synthetic beings are all too human. A robot couldn’t achieve that.

But even if AI eventually became advanced enough to deliver performances indistinguishable from human actors, we just wouldn’t want to watch them. There’s comfort in the idea that we can spot a fake. True believers may claim that CGI and de-ageing are examples of technology that were ultimately embraced, but even those innovations have arguably had a ruinous effect on cinema. See a de-aged Robert DeNiro unconvincingly stomp a shopkeeper in The Irishman, for example.

Those suffering from AI fatigue are already sick of seeing soulless, queasy slop on our newsfeeds, whether it’s Cristiano Ronaldo with eleven fingers or Charlie Kirk being embraced by tearful Jesus. One ethically dubious use of AI characters that has already come to fruition is using them as background characters rather than paying extras. Such AI characters on screen would make us feel like we are living out the “dead internet theory” of modernity — namely, that most social media users are bots unknowingly interacting with other bots, not real people.

While the opposition to and the sheer wrongness of AI actors are likely to ghettoise any such films made with virtual characters, one potential concern is children’s content. In the same way kids can’t now conceive of a society without social media, they could get inured to their content looking strange and devoid of humanity.

Alas, the amount of money being invested in AI makes its ubiquity a foregone conclusion. The oft-quoted Jurassic Park line feels apt: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” For the sake of film, we can only hope AI actors have the staying power of mini-disc players and 3D.

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Rory Kiberd is a freelance writer. He has written book reviews for the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, and the Sunday Business Post, as well as film reviews for Totally Dublin.

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