It has become increasingly clear, over the last few years of internet life, that no basic survival skill can trump the ability to smell horseshit in all its many and various forms. It is, after all, everywhere these days: Flooding social media, seeping into occasional Hollywood projects, and most especially spouting, in colorful and creative arcs, from the mouths of people working to make money off of the gold rush fad occurring around generative artificial intelligence. You have to learn to sniff it out, or risk spending the rest of your life stuck as a gormless chump.
Take, for instance, a panel that went down this weekend at the Zurich Summit—the industry-focused sidebar of the currently running Zurich Film Festival. The participants were Eline Van Der Velden, head of AI video-production company Particle6, and Verena Puhm, who runs the similarly focused Luma AI. The pair were being interviewed by Deadline about their current spate of products, when Van Der Velden made a really weird statement: That her company Xicoia’s new “virtual actress,” a collection of AI video and voice that the firm calls “Tilly Norwood,” would soon be signed by a Hollywood agency. Van Der Velden, who describes Xicoia as a “virtual talent studio,” didn’t give any specifics about who’d step up to perform this alleged act of big-money deal-making, but was happy to use the untested assertion as part of a narrative she and Puhm were pushing, suggesting that filmmakers are softening, sometimes secretly, on the use of AI in making movies and TV.
And, let us be clear: The signing thing may actually happen. Hollywood talent agencies like a faddish publicity stunt as much as the next people, and the raw PR value of “First agency to sign an AI ‘actor’!” could easily lure people into embarrassing territory. (A couple of weeks ago, a little-known record label called Hallwood Media got itself some headlines by signing an AI user named Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who’s used genAI tools to create music and visuals for a fake musician called “Xania Monet.”) But it’s just as clear that the narrative that Van Der Velden and Puhm are selling—buoyed along with headlines like Deadline‘s guileless “Talent agents circle AI actress Tilly Norwood”—are so strident precisely because the whole system only works if people buy into the horseshit. That’s how fads work: A tiny amount of flash, backed up by a rocket engine of FOMO, pushing people past the bounds of commons sense—because heaven forfend you wind up as the last agency to sign their first AI actor, right?
For what it’s worth, you can evaluate “Tilly’s” “performance” for yourself: Van Der Velden has been soft-launching the model in various little avenues of social media, including an Instagram “comedy sketch” that—and we can only speak for ourselves—produces such a hideous uncanny valley effect in its attempt to replicate the way human bodies and mouths move that it gave us a full-on case of the screaming fantods. Will “Tilly Norwood” be signed by these “circling” Hollywood agents? It never pays to underestimate people who think they can find money by digging into copious mounds of horseshit because, as we’ve said, it seems to be our last remaining renewable resource. Even so—you don’t necessarily want to shake their hands in the aftermath, yeah?
