Dawn Images

American actor and UN Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance Joseph Gordon-Levitt has made it clear that he does not consider the world’s first AI-generated ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood to be an actor at all.

In a video posted to his Instagram account on Thursday, Gordon-Levitt called Norwood a “piece of software that’s being branded as an actress”.

He appeared to be responding to a question on whether AI could be creative. He said it was important to remember that “AI is not a person”.

“AI, as we know it, is an algorithmic recombination of human inputs. It’s taken everything that everyone’s written, all the films, all the songs, everything on the internet… And then a very sophisticated and expensive to run algorithm has recombined all those inputs to generate these new outputs.”

That, the actor said, meant “an output that’s branded Tilly Norwood is not an actress”.

Gordon-Levitt said there had to be a person to deliver a performance, like how nobody would say a cartoon character like Donald Duck performed well.

“You say that Donald Duck is an animated character that was created by a number of different artists, writers, animators, voice actors, etc. And all of those artists are given credit for creating Donald Duck. The product known as Tilly Norwood is no different.”

Gordon-Levitt is far from the first person to differentiate Norwood from an actual actor, with the bot’s own creator, Eline Van der Velden, insisting last year the bot was “a work of art” rather than an artist.

That was after her initial comments saying she wanted “Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman” drew the ire of celebrities such as Scream’s Melissa Barrera and Mara Wilson, who played the lead in Matilda in 1996.

More recently, Norwood appeared for an ‘audition’ on CNN and blew it entirely, with the team behind the bot having to perform hours of work just to get it to act out a single scene.

Norwood hasn’t been cast in a released film yet, but she’s set to lead an upcoming feature-length comedy-drama called Misaligned, which has been described as “a hybrid production,” with traditional directors, writers and editors collaborating directly with technical AI specialists, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Hollywood is not happy with AI encroaching into its line of work.

Viewing generative AI as an existential threat to human labour, compensation and creativity, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) went on a historic strike, in 2023, which lasted nearly four months.

The striking writers demanded that nothing written by AI can be considered “literary” or “source” material — industry terms that decide who gets royalties — and scripts written by WGA members cannot “be used to train AI”.