Can tech make an "AI actress" so fake that male columnists won't nut while writing about it?

"Tilly Norwood" may be an obvious and cynical product of the AI hype machine, but not even that can stop male profile writers from drooling.

By William Hughes | October 2, 2025 | 8:52pm

Fake AI "actress" Tilly Norwood, Screenshot: Instagram

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Last last week, we wrote a piece about a company called Xicoia, one of what feels like nine billion AI video production companies currently trying to goldrush the planet to an early grave. The company’s founder, Eline Van Der Velden, was at the Zurich Film Festival at the time, trying to plant an idea in the public consciousness: That the firm’s new AI model—which it refers to as an “AI actress,” with the extremely irritating name “Tilly Norwood”—was about to be signed by a Hollywood talent agency. Van Der Velden (who’s since posted a “please stop yelling at me” comment on the character’s Instagram page) gave no real evidence for this claim, which didn’t stop Deadline from parroting it in headlines, where it provoked frustration and irritation from actual actors who do not have time or energy for this particular flavor of horseshit.

Now, though, we’ve finally gotten our first piece of evidence that this AI homunculus that Xicoia is peddling might actually be a genuine Hollywood actress: “She”‘s just gotten a slobbering, sexually charged profile written about her by a much older male writer, who can’t go a single sentence without implying how very horny he is for the subject of his writing. (But in, like, a complimentary way.) Verily, it’s a true rite of showbiz passage.

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We’ll be honest: We have not read all of Professor Tyler Cowen’s Free Press article “My Favorite Actress Is Not Human”; our familiarity with Cowen’s argument here starts to run out right around the part where the text on the page starts to get all grey and blocked out. (Unlike, say, Paramount owner David Ellison, we don’t feel particularly well-inclined toward tossing our cash at Bari Weiss’ newsletter at the moment.) But even in the excerpts available to paywalled plebes like us, Cowen really seems to be swinging for the “never stop jizzing all over journalism” fences, describing “Tilly” as “beautiful, but not too intimidating,” “just the right amount of British,” and a “gorgeous innovation.” He calls the AI a “hot property,” with a focus on the literalism of the phrase that suggests that it being property is part of the appeal; his sub-hed states that “if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances.” It is a tour de force of letting the reader know you have a boner without ever saying you have a boner, and all in service of a model who looks lifted from the background of a semi-expensive Final Fantasy cutscene.

The AI era has been a feast of embarrassments for the species as a whole, as tech enthusiasts have attempted to state with a straight face that they like AI summaries, AI images, AI videos, and all the other generative garbage increasingly filling our screens. God bless Cowen (and, hey, Tilly too), then, for reminding us that some things are universally human: If you show a male columnist of a certain age and disposition a picture of a woman and tell him it’s an actress, by god, he’ll find a way to skeeve all over it.