A demonstration reel. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook accounts. A separate contact email for enquiries. All staples of an actor’s website.
Except that these AIs all belong to “actor” Tilly Norwood.
This creation represents one of the new AI trends, which are AI “artists” who represent real humans (which, according to their creators, is the goal). Aline Van Der Velden, The creator of tilly norwoodhave stated that their focus is on making the creation “a bigger star” in the “AI genre”, a distinction that has been used to justify the existence of AI-generated actors as it does not take jobs away from real actors. Van der Velden has apparently stated that Tilly Norwood was made photorealistic to provoke a reaction, and it’s working, as talent agencies are reportedly noticing. represent it.
And it’s not just Hollywood. Prominent producer Timbaland has created his own AI entertainment company and launched his first “artist”. Bye, The music was created by uploading one’s own demo to the Suno platform, reworking it with AI, and adding lyrics later.
But while technologically impressive, the emergence of AI “artists” risks devaluing creativity as a fundamentally human act, and in the process, dehumanizing and “dehumanizing” creative labor.
Promoting industry at the expense of creativity
The generative AI boom is deeply tied to the creative industries, with profit-hungry machines making as much money as possible from every movie, song, and TV show. Of course, this predates AI “artists,” but the AI agenda is becoming even more apparent. One of the motivations behind the Writers Guild Strike of 2023 was to combat the threat of studios using AI to replace writers.
For powerful players in the industry, employing AI “artists” means less reliance on human labor – cutting costs and making it possible to produce products at a much higher rate. And in an industry already known for poor working conditions, there’s significant appeal in dealing with a creation that doesn’t “need” them to behave humanely.
Technological innovation has always posed the risk of eliminating some jobs, but AI “artists” are a whole new monster in the industry. It is not just about speeding up processes or certain tasks, but about diverting human labor from the product. This means that in an industry where it’s already extremely difficult to make money as a creative, demand will drop even further – and that’s not even taking into account the consequences for the art itself.
AI “slop” acquisition
The interest in making money over quality has always dominated the industry; Netflix and Hallmark aren’t all making those Christmas romantic comedies with the same plot because they’re origin stories, nor are studios adapting the countless reboots and remakes based on successful art because remaking a 90s movie with a 20-something Hollywood star would be visionary. But they still have their audiences and ultimately require creative output and labor.
Now, imagine that instead of these rom-coms cluttering Netflix, we have AI-generated movies and TV shows, starring creations like Tilly Norwood, and the soundtrack comes from a voice, lyrics, and production that was generated by AI.
The entire model of Generative AI is dependent on re-collecting and recycling existing data. Of course, it is a technological feat that Suno can compose a song and convert Sora text into video images; What it is not is a creative renaissance. AI-generated writing is already taking over, from classroom essays to motivational LinkedIn posts, and in addition to ruining em dashes, it puts out content of increasingly low and robotic quality. AI is the next supernatural destroyer of “performer” “singing” and “acting” quality and will likely alienate audiences who turn to art to feel connected.
Art has a long tradition of being used as a method of resistance and challenging the status quo; Protest has been a major part of music culture – look no further than the civil rights and anti-war movements. United States in the 1960s. It is so powerful that there are attempts by political actors to suppress it and punish artists. Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival it was just an accident, He was sentenced to prison in absentia in Iran for making the film, and this is not the first sentence he has received for his films. Would studios like Sony or Warner Bros. release songs or movies like this if they could order marketing-tailored content from a bot?
A sign during the Writer’s Strike famously said, “Chatgpt doesn’t have childhood trauma.” An AI “artist” may be able to fulfill a creator’s agenda to a limited extent, but what value does it have coming from a generated creation that has no lived experience and emotions – especially when it comes to the motivation for creating art in the first place?
Above all, Generative AI is by no means a neutral entity; We’re seeing a lot of stereotypical and harmful content, especially without input from real artists. The fact that most AI “performers” are depicted as young women with distinctive physical characteristics is no coincidence. This is an intensification of a long-standing trend of creating virtual assistants—from Eliza From Siri to Alexa to AI “artists” like Tilly Norwood or Timbaland’s Tata-“women”, who reinforce Tendency to push women into “supportive” roles they are Designed to meet user needsClear expression of human prejudices.
Privacy and Plagiarism
To ensure that “actors” and “singers” look and sound as human as possible in movies, commercials, and songs, it is essential that they be trained on real-world data. Tilly Norwood’s creator Van der Velden has defended herself by claiming that she only used licensed data and went through an extensive research process looking at thousands of images for her creation. But “licensed data” does not automatically make taking the data ethical; See redditWhich signed a million dollar contract to allow Google to train its AI models on Reddit data. The vast data of Reddit users is not secure, only to be monetized by the organization.
AI expert Ed Newton-Rex have discussed How generative AI is constantly stealing from artists, and proposed measures to ensure that data is licensed and trained in the public domain so that it can be used in creation. There are a number of ways for individual artists to protect their online work: including watermarks, opting out of data collection, and Ways to block AI bots. While these strategies can keep data More Safe, given how vast generative AI is, they’re probably more of a security than a solution.
jennifer king Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence has provided some ways to protect data and personal information more generally, such as making “opt out” the default option for data sharing, and for legislation that focuses not only on the transparency of AI use but also on its regulation – this will likely be an uphill battle. trump administration Efforts are being made to usurp state AI rules.
This is the moral house in which AI “artists” are living. Think about the faces of the real people who went into the making of Tilly Norwood. A company may have licensed that data for use, but the artists whose “data” is their likeness and creativity probably did not do so (at least directly). In this light, AI “artists” are a form of plagiarism.
Underestimating creativity as fundamentally human.
Given how art has been transformed by technology before with generative AI, it could be argued that this is the next step in the process of change rather than something to worry about. But photography and animation and typewriters and all the other inventions used to justify the onslaught of AI “artists” were not elimination Of human creativity. Photography was not a replacement for painting, but a new art, even if it was also related to painters. There’s a difference between being a new, experimental way of doing something and using massive amounts of data (especially data taken without consent) to create creations that blur the lines of what is human and what is not. For example, Rebecca Xu, a professor of computer art and animation at Syracuse, who teaches the course “AI in Creative Practice,” argues that artists can incorporate AI into their creative process. But as she warns, “AI provides useful tools, but you still need to create your own original work rather than use something generated by AI.”
It is difficult to understand how AI “artists” benefit human creativity, which is a fundamental part of our expression and intellectual development. just look cave art Since the Paleolithic period. Even humans 30,000 years ago, who did not have secure food and shelter, were making art. Unlike other industries, art did not come into existence solely for the sake of profit.
The arts are already economically undervalued, as evidenced by the lack of funding in schools. Today, a kid who wants to be a writer is likely to be bombarded with marketing from generic AI platforms like ChatGPT to using these tools to “write” a story. The result may resemble a narrative, but it won’t necessarily have any of the creativity or emotional depth that comes from being human, and more importantly, not actually written by the child. Still, the fact that this AI-generated storytelling is now possible curbs the industrial need for human artists.
How do we proceed?
Although profit-hungry power players are embracing AI “artists,” the same cannot be said about public opinion. Most artists and audiences alike are not interested in AI-generated art, let alone AI “artists.” The power of public opinion should not be underestimated; The writer’s strike is probably the best example of this.
Thus, collective mobilization will likely be important in the future when it comes to challenging AI “artists” against the interests of studios, record labels, and other members of the creative industry ruling class. There have already been victories, such as the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023, which resulted in this condition being put into a contract Studios can’t use AI as a credited writer. And because music, film, and television are full of stars, often with financial and cultural power, the resistance voiced in the media could benefit from more actionable steps; For example, a major production company run by an A-list actor might pledge not to employ any AI-generated “artists” in their work.
Beyond industry and labor, art being unimportant unless you’re a “star” can also play an important role in changing the conversation around it. This means funding arts programs in schools and libraries so that young people know that art is something they can do, something that is fun and that brings joy – not necessarily to earn money or a livelihood but to express themselves and connect with the world.
The fundamental risk of AI “artists” is that they will become so common that pursuing art will seem pointless, and much of the art we consume will lose its fundamentally human qualities. But human-made art and human artists will never become obsolete – that would require human impulses and the existence of human-made art to fundamentally end. The challenge is to ensure that artistic creation is not relegated to the margins of life.
