In the week-and-a-half since her Zurich Summit “debut,” so-called AI actor Tilly Norwood has been met with concern, fear, and disgust from the human actor community. Today, in a letter published in The Hollywood Reporter, Betty Gilpin (who played an AI-battling nun in Mrs. Davis) shared some sage wisdom with Norwood. “When I was your age… well, wait, no. You are both infant and immortal, like Thor in a diaper,” Gilpin writes. “I mean, when I was starting out in my career like you, this very thing happened. An actress older than me pulled me aside and gave me advice.”
In the letter, Gilpin takes on the daunting task of explaining the quintessential humanness of performance. Explaining how she first fell in love with theater as a teenager, she says, “Tilly, you never had to be 14, so I’ll tell you what google can’t. It feels like your soul gets a broken glass enema. You go from curious about this marvelous world to drowning in un-marvelous you. Who am I? How should I be? Am I alone? Your human brain answers ‘no one,’ ‘invisible’ and ‘yes.'” But while watching a bad play, one transcendent actor “was so good that, impossibly, I left myself.”
As Gilpin concedes, an AI “actor” can remain young and beautiful forever, without the pesky interference of aging and emotion to transgress or interrupt its “career.” An AI character will say and do exactly what its handler tells it to—”Property without zits or opinions,” as Gilpin puts it. She wonders “if an eyelash or toothshine of mine from a screenshot twenty years ago is one speck of your billions of Hot Young Actresses mosaic that is your not-real face.” Gilpin lays out a solid and beautifully articulated argument for the power of connection, admitting that she, too, is “made up of a million bits of plagiarism of every person I’ve had the privilege to come across.” But the difference is that Gilpin draws from a rich well of experience over the course of a lifetime, and Tilly Norwood draws from computer programming. You can read the full letter for yourself here.
