Tilly Norwood's creator gets death threats
Tilly Norwood's creator, Eline Van der Velden, has received death threats because of the AI actress.
Tilly Norwood's creator has received death threats because of the AI actress.
Eline Van der Velden has been in contact with police after receiving a number of sinister warning messages against her life as a result of her involvement with the controversial digital creation.
She told the New York Post newspaper's Page Six: “They say there’s no humanity behind it, and then they go after the human behind it. It’s interesting to me."
The creation of an AI star has faced criticism from actresses including Emily Blunt, Melissa Barrera, and Whoopi Goldberg but Eline insisted she has had discussions with "loads and loads" of people in the entertainment industry keen to work with Tilly.
She said: “The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Directors have reached out. They want to work with Tilly.”
Publicist Michelle Waldron added: "People who were detracting four months ago have now seen the light and understood. Because a lot of people got swept away by the headlines without reading the full story. Now that they have, they’re like, ‘Actually, this could be useful for me.’”
Eline urged real life actors to engage with emerging AI technology in order to "future-proof" themselves, rather than condemning its use.
She said: “It takes a lot of human creativity to make something that good. There’s artistry in it.
“Look, this s***’s happened. I’m not happy about the fact it’s trained on all my material, either. We’re all in it together.
"I’m never going to receive a cheque for whatever is trained on me. It’s trained on every single person. It’s like, all of public domain, and maybe even stuff that they shouldn’t have trained on. I’m just going to take the positive in that, and go forth and make new things.
“That’s why I made her: so that she can be taken into account to prepare the industry to think about, ‘How are we going to move forward with these types of characters?’ Because I think I’m not going to be the only one.
“I’m fully aligned with SAG and how they’re going to move forward in these negotiations to make room for these types of characters, too...
Eline stressed Tilly was never created to take the jobs of "real actors".
She said: “I think Tilly should stay in a world that doesn’t inhabit real actors, because I wouldn’t want her to take the job of a real actor, even though it’s me behind it.
“Don’t worry – we’ll still have human actors. That was always the plan. The plan was not for her to take someone’s role in a real film or TV series. She’s in her own world, and that’s where she’ll stay.”
The AI actress has been slammed by acting union SAG-AFTRA, but Eline urged people not to take things so seriously, and pointed out Tilly isn't even fully AI-generated.
She said: “She’s for entertainment purposes. She’s not to be taken too seriously. It’s meant to be a bit of fun. AI is a bit funny.
“I think we should just make it really clear that I am Tilly. I’m just acting through a proxy now. We do a lot of performance capture. So it’s me actually acting, and we do a bit of a hybrid.
“People think that we’ve taken actors, and we’ve trained Tilly on actors. That’s not at all how it works. We use publicly available systems — LLMs that have been trained on publicly available data."
