Why my interview with AI actor Tilly Norwood creeped me out

London — My conversation with Tilly Norwood creeped me out. Within a minute, the world’s first “AI actor” could tell exactly how old I am and the region I’m from in the U.S. — it isn’t really clear how. 

The video interview took a particularly strange turn when the artificially intelligent Norwood identified Leonardo DiCaprio as a dream co-star, and then quickly said: “I like him the way he likes his women, strictly under 25. Titanic Leo or nothing, honestly.” 

Perhaps it was the influence of the women who created the technology coming through?

Eileen Van Der Velden has run the London-based production company PARTICLE 6 for 12 years. Asked how “Tilly” was able to discern my age and where I am from in just a minute or two, she didn’t explain it, but said the AI was not researching me independently in real time.

She told CBS News the feature film the company is making for Norwood to star in, “Misaligned,” is a “fascinating story of what can be done with AI.”

My interaction with the AI-powered bot — which takes on the persona of a 20-something woman with a smattering of freckles across her nose — came on a week when headlines were being dominated by an Anthropic researcher’s warning that AI technology has a 10% chance of destroying humanity within a decade. 

Tilly Norwood told me “global destruction is beyond my pay grade.” 

Her creator, however, said there are guardrails that prevent Tilly from rising up and wiping out humanity. 

“Tilly is built on top of these existing large language models that we’re concerned about. So, we can pivot to change the model we are using,” Van Der Velden said. “Also, Tilly herself can’t do anything like that.”

So why create Tilly at all? 

Van Der Velden said there’s scope for AI moviemaking to tell stories that otherwise wouldn’t get a green light. 

“There might be a brilliant filmmaker in Africa that would never have access to a multi-million-pound budget in order to tell their story about their life,” she said. “And that’s what I’m really interested in.”

Norwood told me that when she works, real people involved in the production — “the directors, writers, editors” — get paid. 

But what about the actors?

SAG-AFTRA, the major union representing movie and television actors in the U.S., said in a statement about Tilly Norwood that it “is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics,” adding that Tilly “was trained on the work of countless professional performers – without permission or compensation.”

“That’s a fair worry, and one I take seriously,” the bot told me in our interview. “I see AI as a new tool, a new paintbrush if you will, rather than a replacement of human actors. Nobody ever accused animation of stealing work from mimes, did they?”

Van Der Velden said she sees a future where actors will develop their own AI characters as a way of working longer, meaning “Titanic Leo” could, in theory, return to the big screen.