Several major media companies, including CNN, NBC and the United Kingdom’s ITV, had a first-of-its-kind interview this week — and not everyone is thrilled about it.
The outlets interviewed Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actor” created by Eline Van der Velden, who works for AI-production studio Particle6.
Since its creation in 2025, Tilly Norwood has been met with fierce backlash from actual actors like Emily Blunt, unions like SAG-AFTRA and the general public at large, who are concerned about the loss of acting jobs, the loss of human connection and the fact that it was trained on real actors’ behaviors without any compensation.
In the “press tour” videos this week, interviewers asked Tilly Norwood about its software, its prompts, its creator (who was also there for some of the interviews) and its acting skills (which CNN anchor Erin Burnett described as “not great”). Tilly Norwood was also asked its thoughts on world events and the threat of AI.
Not all of the interviewers were thrilled by Tilly Norwood’s presence, with one “Good Morning Britain” host even calling one of her responses “chilling.” That sentiment was also deeply felt by media consumers.
“Not an actor,” wrote one Threads user in reply to NBC’s post about its interview with the AI technology. Another wrote, “You do understand that that’s bad, right? Please, tell me you understand.”
On Good Morning Britain’s post about the interview, an Instagram user commented, “And how much water was wasted in the making of this interview.” “If I could permanently delete one thing from the planet, it would definitely be AI,” wrote another.
The Tilly Norwood interview lines up with “huge amounts of eye rolling and groans” about AI, experts say.
John Wihbey, the director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab at Northeastern University in Boston, said “there’s a whole bunch of things going on” when asked for his thoughts on these interactions.
First, these videos seem to be a publicity stunt at a time when generative AI and video diffusion model image technology is new but “ready for prime time,” as these images become more realistic and more prevalent online and on social media. “But it’s also lining up with a huge amount of eye-rolling and groans over the AI swath everyone’s seeing on social media,” Wihbey said.
“There’s also a huge amount of public backlash around everything from data centers to all the fears we have over cyber capabilities that have come into the headlines lately,” he added.
Just last week, a former Anthropic AI safety researcher posted multiple social media posts about the technology, claiming it is “gambling with our lives” and that AI developers believe it “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“The media outlets interviewing this AI avatar/actor, whatever we want to call her, arrives at a kind of perfect storm moment where the public is suddenly very, very aware of AI’s pervasiveness, its potential for mischief, its potential for deception and now its potential to hack into institutions and generally create some potential for chaos,” Wihbey said.
Wihbey noted that while survey data years ago indicated that people were “soft” on their views of AI, he and other experts in the field predicted there would be more attention and backlash to AI at some point, and we are squarely there now.
People’s attitudes and judgments of AI are hardening overall, according to Wihbey.
“So Tilly Norwood just becomes in some ways a symbol, in some ways a Rorschach test, right? … Here’s something very tangible. Here’s something very in your face: an AI actually replacing the role of celebrity being interviewed,” Wihbey said.
While some folks may find these kinds of interviews entertaining, others are going to find it “distasteful,” he said, “and representative of an attempt to sort of supplant human agency and the integrity of human beings.”
“I feel like for such a long time we’ve been sold this idea that technology is going to do all the stuff you don’t want to do,” said Emily DeJeu, an assistant teaching professor of business communications at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and expert in AI for business communication.
Perhaps that means reading emails or populating spreadsheets: two things that AI is pretty good at doing. But now, AI is being used to make art, whether that’s painting, writing poetry, filming videos or, in the case of Tilly Norwood, acting, said DeJeu.
“These are things that people get, derive joy out of,” Dejeu said. “These are not drudge tasks. These are beautiful things that people really enjoy and that society has traditionally placed high value on.”
DeJeu said that when she talks to her students, one observation both she and her students make is that AI seems like a solution in search of a problem.
“What are we fixing here?” she said. AI isn’t swooping in to dust your living room furniture or fold your laundry. “I think this particular AI actor-actress thing might be the best example of that … what problem are we solving? We like to think about new innovation as solving problems that are widely felt. But I think in this case, I don’t think anybody sees human actors as a problem to overcome.”
Wihbey said he thinks people are “rightfully concerned” about the Tilly Norwood video interviews.
“The way that this is headed is that our entire information environment may just be a hall of mirrors,” Wihbey said. “Obviously, the media outlets are going to specify ‘this is an AI-powered bot and avatar’ and they’re going to disclaim all of those things properly … but it could be that in the not-too-distant future, basically all of the news anchors and most of the personas we see in video form … are just all AI.”
This is already happening in Asia, where multiple countries use AI-generated news anchors, he said. “And so I think probably some of those reactions against the Tilly character are just of a piece with the reaction against AI slop, generally.”
Wihbey does find it “somewhat objectionable” that AI is being used in media as a way to create “humans” that aren’t humans.
“It’s sort of a publicity stunt for the company behind Tilly. I guess we live in a capitalist society, so kudos to them, they figured out a way to get attention and maybe raise the profile of whatever movie they’re trying to sell or something,” Wihbey said.
But when it comes to Tilly Norwood, “she’s sort of the face of everything that people are hating on and scared of right now,” Wihbey added.
