A Fake Actress Teaches us about Real AI

Tilly Norwood is creating quite a stir in media circles.  She is the newest “it” girl in Hollywood.  She’s represented by a notable talent agency and is being seriously considered for movie, TV, and commercial roles.  She doesn’t actually exist. That is, not in human form.  She is a product of artificial intelligence, created by a production team based in the UK.

Source: Instagram

Tilly’s “birth” in early 2025 has enormous implications for creative industries like moviemaking.  Studios are grappling with weighty issues while actors and directors alike bemoan the use of AI as a direct threat to their craft.  Hollywood appears to be the classic bellwether industry that can teach us a great deal about how AI will transform every business.  As this dynamic plays out, let’s look closely at how Tilly came to be.  This alone will provide instructive lessons as to how Ai will shape the future of businesses, and what we as clever businesspeople can do now to thrive in the new era.

Tilly was created by an accomplished human actress and producer, Eline Van der Velden, who started with a simple, one-line ChatGPT prompt: “A stunning female celebrity with global appeal. She has symmetrical facial features, clear radiant skin, and captivating green eyes. Her hair is long.”  In other words, it began as a rapid, cheap experiment with a loose goal in mind.

It is important—really important—to note that the initial output generated by this simple prompt was far from the ideal actress that Ms. Van der Velden had envisioned.  Anyone looking at the image would instantly recognize it as artificially generated.  It took her and a team of more than a dozen six months and thousands of tweaks to get to the final version of Tilly.  They worked on her hair, her voice, personality, skin color—you name it.  Sometimes the AI would create new versions of Tilly that were unique and valuable.  Other times, strange and inappropriate.  With each new iteration, the team painstakingly accepted the good features while rejecting the bad ones.  The production team used a whole suite of technical tools outside of AI to build features into Tilly’s ultimate persona.  As of today it appears that Tilly has a bright future ahead.

Now to the lessons…

Tilly’s creation underscores a point I have been trying to make over and over in the last few years about this whole “vibe” myth.  You’ve probably heard the phrase Vibe Programming, meaning that untrained faux-programmers can develop sophisticated software by simply speaking code into existence through AI prompts in plain English about useful features and so forth.  I think it’s all BS.  You can see how Tilly’s creators were all highly trained in the technical and artistic qualities of “good” actors and actresses and could not have built her without those skills.  Tilly took a long time and countless hours of experienced professionals to come into existence. Real AI (as opposed to the “recreational” kind) is hard work and requires deep subject matter expertise.   This is far from the narrative that the popular press wants you to believe about rank amateurs producing an AI-sourced product in the basement.

Second, the intended use case for Tilly is not likely to be in the next Oscar-nominated full length movie.  Rather, the creators are going to use her for independent projects that are suitable for smaller budgets.  The implication here is that there will now be a much lower breakeven bar for independent studios and even individuals, creating content at a fraction of the normal cost and timeframe, therefore opening the doors for short-form, internet-based content that would not have existed otherwise.  So much for the scary zero-sum labor game you are being told day after day.

Note that it took a technologically sophisticated production team using a whole range of AI and non-AI tools to make the final product happen.  That means integration skills—blending AI with a number of other technologies—is the secret sauce to making AI produce useful assets.  We’ve seen this ourselves in our own project work.  AI alone is not an end game.

Becoming successful in an AI era means being a good “student” of useful examples of AI, so we need to note them when they come along.  Thank you Tilly for teaching us some valuable lessons.  Say, can I get your autograph?

Epilogue

In my last blog entry, The Best Job in the World, (link)I made a point about workers combining multiple, seemingly unrelated skills to generate superadditive value. My example was the baseball phenom Shohei Othani, who is both a great pitcher and a great batter.  I would like to note that the veteran actress that created Tilly Norwood referenced here,  Eline Van der Velden, has a bachelors and masters degree in Physics.