It’s not just Hollywood that’s been grappling with how to deal with AI-generated characters. Wikipedia editors are figuring all this out as they go along, too.
Following reports this week that an AI “actress” named Tilly Norwood is attracting interest from talent agents and rattling real-life performers who make their living in movies and on TV, Wikipedia editors moved quickly to create a page for the character—and almost immediately began arguing over how to describe it.
Is it a synthetic actress? Is it even a she? Can Tilly Norwood, despite having 45,000 followers on Instagram, be accurately described as doing anything?
These are the types of questions that have been plaguing the dutiful volunteers who are tasked with editing the world’s largest crowd-sourced encyclopedia. While few would argue that the AI character doesn’t meet Wikipedia’s notability guidelines, no one seems quite sure what exactly to say about it.
“I’m not comfortable with asserting that Tilly Norwood exists, actually,” one editor wrote on Tuesday, the day the page was created. “I’m also not comfortable with the article using gendered pronouns for the Tilly construct.”
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The discussions this week among Wikipedia editors—which are visible via the website’s “talk” pages—offer a fascinating window into the semantic debates that our society is facing more broadly at a time when we’re sharing more and more of our screen time with AI-generated objects designed to look and act like us.
An early revision of Tilly Norwood’s page described the character as an “artificial intelligence-generated actress” who “starred” in an AI-generated sketch comedy show.
The current version of the page has toned down the anthropomorphic language, although the gendered pronouns remain intact: “Tilly Norwood is an artificial intelligence-generated character marketed as an actress.”
A review of talk pages reveals that editors debated passionately about whether to refer to Tilly Norwood as an actress at all, with some arguing that Wikipedia’s language should merely reflect common usage. “‘Actress’ is how the vast majority of reliable sources describe her,” one person wrote.
‘Trained on the work of professional performers’
Tilly Norwood is the brainchild of Xicoia, an AI talent studio launched by Dutch comedian and producer Eline van der Velden. The studio is a division of production company Particle6.
The character, whose social media feed includes a mix of AI-generated modeling shots, selfies, and epic movie scenes, made a splash recently at the Zurich Film Festival and has since sparked industry backlash.
SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents screen actors, issued a blistering statement, calling Tilly Norwood a “computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers—without permission or compensation.”
A report last year from consulting firm CVL Economics found that more than 203,000 entertainment-related jobs in the United States could be disrupted by generative AI technologies by 2026.
Fortunately, where Wikipedia is concerned at least, this is not entirely new territory. After all, the site has hosted a page for Mickey Mouse since 2001. For the record, Mickey is described as a he.