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Fake AI-Generated Actress Gets Agent - and a Very Angry Reaction from (Human) Actors Union (yahoo.com) 99

Posted by EditorDavid from the ready-for-my-closeup dept.
A computer-generated actress appearing in Instagram shorts now has a talent agent, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The massive screen actors union SAG-AFTRA "weighed in with a withering response." SAG-AFTRA believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.

To be clear, "Tilly Norwood" is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we've seen, audiences aren't interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn't solve any "problem" — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.

Additionally, signatory producers should be aware that they may not use synthetic performers without complying with our contractual obligations, which require notice and bargaining whenever a synthetic performer is going to be used.
"They are taking our professional members' work that has been created, sometimes over generations, without permission, without compensation and without acknowledgment, building something new," SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin told the Los Angeles Times in an interview: "But the truth is, it's not new. It manipulates something that already exists, so the conceit that it isn't harming actors — because it is its own new thing — ignores the fundamental truth that it is taking something that doesn't belong to them," Astin said. "We want to allow our members to benefit from new technologies," Astin said. "They just need to know that it's happening. They need to give permission for it, and they need to be bargained with...."

Some actors called for a boycott of any agents who decide to represent Norwood. "Read the room, how gross," In the Heights actor Melissa Barrera wrote on Instagram. "Our members reserve the right to not be in business with representatives who are operating in an unfair conflict of interest, who are operating in bad faith," Astin said.
But this week the head of a new studio from startup Luma AI "said all the big companies and studios were working on AI assisted projects," writes Deadline — and then claimed "being under NDA, she was not in a position to announce any of the details."
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Fake AI-Generated Actress Gets Agent - and a Very Angry Reaction from (Human) Actors Union More

Fake AI-Generated Actress Gets Agent - and a Very Angry Reaction from (Human) Actors Union

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  • How to reward for the knowledge used in training (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hadleyburg ( 823868 ) on Sunday October 05, 2025 @08:26PM (#65705868)

    On the topic of AI generated content being theft:
    I heard an interview with Brian Eno in which he suggested a system by which profits from AI were partially distributed to society as a whole. I think the idea was that it was too difficult to identify and reward specific holders of IP (the models being trained on "all" human recorded knowledge), but it is nevertheless inappropriate to have zero financial reward for that input.

    • What profits? Last I checked nobody had climbed out of the red in the space yet.

      • Re:How to reward for the knowledge used in trainin (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Sunday October 05, 2025 @08:35PM (#65705892)

        The company may not be profitable but rest assured the suits are doing just fine.

        • Since it is a 'female' AI that's doing the acting...shouldn't the term be "actress"...?

          • Re: How to reward for the knowledge used in traini (Score:4, Informative)

            by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Monday October 06, 2025 @03:43PM (#65707652) Homepage

            No. Not since around 2005 or so. "Actor" has pretty much always been the gender neutral word in English, while actress is a gendered word. At some point, Hollywood sort of switched to using the gender neutral version.

            I remember this happening because I switched to gender neutral words sometimes in the 90s, based simply on linguistics. Since it was before Hollywood switched, I noticed it when female actor started calling themselves "actors" in interviews.

      • If the people using copyrighted material to train their AI aren't making a profit, that will just make it less desirable for them to "borrow" other people's work without asking or paying royalties especially when you consider how much public domain text is out there and free to use.
    • How do you know it was stolen?

      • How do you know it was stolen?

        True - "theft" and "stolen" are loaded terms.

        I suppose the idea is that if we accept it as fair that a firm should pay the owners of the capital and labour it uses in the pursuit of profit, then we we might be open to the idea that firms profiting from LLM-based AI should remunerate the factors of that production. The trouble is, it is difficult to identify and quantify all the billions of pieces of input that go into this training. So as we do with taxation, perhaps we could consider a simpler system that

        • From the first mention of AI so many people began attempting to leverage the potential. This union in particular about 2 decades ago decided to make rules to give creators private control of efforts which is hard to imagine since the work is done under contract. Every legal action since has been to fix that damage.

    • On the topic of AI generated content being theft:

      The problem with this is that it makes us all thieves. All our work, regardless of field, is based and built on the work of those who came before us. As Newton himself said back in 17th century "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Three and a half centuries later we've got here by doing a lot of shoulder standing and never paying royalties of everything we go on to create to those who taught and inspired us.

      I'd be very, very leery of expanding IP rights to allow this.

      • The problem with this is that it makes us all thieves. All our work, regardless of field, is based and built on the work of those who came before us. As Newton himself said back in 17th century "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Three and a half centuries later we've got here by doing a lot of shoulder standing and never paying royalties of everything we go on to create to those who taught and inspired us.

        I'd be very, very leery of expanding IP rights to allow this. I'm sure the artists calling for this are not planning to abuse it but we all know by know that standing in the wings are corporations who will that such rights and clobber us all with them.

        I agree that whenever we create something we are always using previous knowledge to some extent. The intellectual property system, with all its faults, attempts to allocate reward for this. It will do so for wholesale copying of a previous work, and will to some extent dive into the grey areas. But it's just too difficult and unrealistic to identify and reward all those giants (and even medium stature people) on whose shoulders we might stand. There are so many of them.

        But having said that, if we create a s

        • How do you propose this rewarding "humanity" is actually implemented and executed? Who decides how humanity should be rewarded, or how those rewards should be used? There is no such thing as an absolute "good for humanity", since all "good" is relative "for whom".

          • How do you propose this rewarding "humanity" is actually implemented and executed? Who decides how humanity should be rewarded, or how those rewards should be used? There is no such thing as an absolute "good for humanity", since all "good" is relative "for whom".

            Personally I suspect the proposal is impractical and not feasible with politics the way is it.
            But if I was permitted a small diversion into fantasy, I would suggest that money would be the best "how", so that all recievers could choose their own "good". And I would suggest "everyone in the world" for "whom". The idea is that the knowledge being harvested for training comes from "humanity".

            But taxation is implemented on a nation by nation basis, so the above couldn't be implemented. This suggestion came from

            • "Good for everyone in the world" is a utopian illusion - it cannot exist unless humans turn into a Borg-like species where individuals are completely expandable in serving the interest of the collective, and of course if there is no corruption (i.e. no individuals attempting to put their interests above the collective). It is very much like communism.

      • Copyright law always had to draw a distinction between 'was inspired by' and 'copied'. Inspiration means the source material gives you ideas and thoughts which will then influence the work you produce yourself. Copying means, you do no work of your own, you just take existing stuff and at most tweak it a bit. There isn't always a clear dividing line between the two and there are always grey areas but a lot of the time the distinction will be quite obvious. For example fantasy authors creating worlds with a

        • It takes a lot of existing material from various sources and just shuffles it about to create a sort of randomized mash up of all these sources.

          Which is exactly what we do a lot, if not all, the time. We take existing ideas but rearrange them into something that can appear very new. A lot of people at the time that the iPhone launched complained that everything it did had been done before but just not quite in the same way and all in the same device - and yet that was something we typically regard as new, innovative and revolutionary. Arguably, any new musical composition is merely a rearrangement of notes that have all been played before. etc.

          • That's my big concern with this. The ultimate consequences of the types of legislation that people are now calling for are potentially very damaging if you have a large corporation willing to aggressively pursue law suits. Even limiting any new laws to just AI-generated content won't help since it is impossible to differentiate human and AI content reliably meaning humans could get sued for content they created.

            That's a legitimate concern. That's the problem with arguments about AI copyright issues, they involve one social ill - AI - against another - copyright, or at least its abuse by giant litigous corporations. To start with, you'd definitely want different laws for AI and humans. Humans are capable of creativity, so you give them a benefit of a doubt, but AI, being just a piece of software, cannot be creative by definition, so for any AI-generated output involving copyrighted material, the developers of that

            • This won't stop the copyright holders suing but that way it's just money passing hands between big corporations, Sony and Disney vs OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or whoever else.

              How's that going to work exactly? How will Sony know whom to sue if they contact me and I tell them I made the video myself? If they do not believe me they will have to sue me to get a name and what happens if the court does not believe me too? Even if I did make the video with some AI company's product, I'd be the one who made money by uploading it not that AI company so why are they the ones who have to pay?

              You can't cut the creator out of the legal process so easily: they are the only one who knows w

    • Re:How to reward for the knowledge used in trainin (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday October 05, 2025 @09:40PM (#65705996)

      It's an interesting idea hey? A system by which some wealth is distributed to society as a whole. Someone should really look into that.

      • It's an interesting idea hey? A system by which some wealth is distributed to society as a whole. Someone should really look into that.

        Sarcasm alarm activated... :-)

        Yes - We are probably just talking about taxation. But would it be a normal kind of taxation? It is not nation-specific for a start. How should the reward be made? And it would be a tax on a very narrow area of profit. I don't think it could be implemented with current taxation mechanisms.

        • Perhaps a levy or a charge might work. They are often used to offset the impact of some activity.
        • If you were to tax AI, then AI will simply move to a country in which it is not taxed and you will be left behind without the productivity improvements it brings.

          • If you were to tax AI, then AI will simply move to a country in which it is not taxed and you will be left behind without the productivity improvements it brings.

            Brian Eno's idea was more idealistic than taxation by a nation. It sounded more like something conducted on a worldwide basis.
            I know. I know. That doesn't chime very well in America.

            • Like an artisan grant for generating quality original content to later end up scraped? Could be useful, biggest problem with a global grant system is going to be that the govts are going to want to tax it. Lesser issues that it would be gameable, perhaps, but it would at worst end up like the Olympics, I suppose. (Some corruption but plenty of legit athletes benefit)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Corporate taxes are a thing already. We've even got a (most of the) world minimum.

    • Sounds great. How exactly does this work? We tax the AI and divide the proceeds equally to all 8 billion people on Earth?

      • Sounds great. How exactly does this work? We tax the AI and divide the proceeds equally to all 8 billion people on Earth?

        "Exactly"? This was a suggestion by the artist Brian Eno.
        I don't think it was intended as a practical suggestion ready for implementation. He was just making the point that something like this might be morally appropriate.

        • So "morally appealing" but completely impractical. Even if you did implement this, I'm guessing the costs of distribution of this compensation to every single person on Earth would eat up most, if not all, of it. Say you taxed Goggle 10% on their entire $111B annual profit (which definitely is not all AI), everyone on earth gets about $1.38, before any distribution/tracking costs (even a cost of a stamp would for domestic US post would eat up more than half of it, internationally this would turn into a bill

          • So "morally appealing" but completely impractical. Even if you did implement this, I'm guessing the costs of distribution of this compensation to every single person on Earth would eat up most, if not all, of it. Say you taxed Goggle 10% on their entire $111B annual profit (which definitely is not all AI), everyone on earth gets about $1.38, before any distribution/tracking costs (even a cost of a stamp would for domestic US post would eat up more than half of it, internationally this would turn into a bill to pay.

            This sounds like other nonsensical solutions such as "studies show people with bachelor degrees make more money, so let's just give everyone a bachelor degree with their high school diploma - poverty solved", or "chlorine kills 99.9% of bacteria, why no inject people with it to kill COVID - pandemic ended".

            Steady on.

            I do accept your point that in the end it is only practical solutions that can be implemented.

            The point that Eno was making was that given the nature of LLM-based AI, something like this might be morally appropriate.
            If we agree with the premise, then the fact that it is impractical doesn't resolve the argument. It would presumably leave us dissatisfied with the status quo.

    • So this equates to "We can't even keep track of how much stuff we used without permission or purchase, so instead of us going back and doing the work honestly, we'll appease the masses with trinkets and keep the massive piles of cash for us"

    • At the same time, a human child who wants to become an actor, watches actors act and learns from it. We didn't make Leonardo DiCaprio pay Al Pacino for providing training data. I learned to play the guitar by learning Ramones songs. Should I have paid them for the training data?

      It seems to me that the best they can hope to do is make an "AI actor" pay SAG dues. That's as close as we can sanely get to making new actors pay old actors for showing them how to act. Maybe pay for streaming service subscr

  • Isn't this the real life plot of Simone (w/Al Pacino) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

  • why does the computer-generated actress need a human talent agent?

    let her get a computer-generated agent

    • Surely the "agent" in this situation is analagous to the owner of a bulldozer trying to get an earthmoving job.

  • Tilly is a real AI generated actress, WTF is a fake AI generated actress? Why is the title so biased? Would anyone else like news that is editorialized?
  • They'd better get used to the prospect of being replaced by AI-generated characters at some point: movie producers will jump at the opportunity of saving millions of dollar per movie in prima donna salaries.

  • Not to mention the porn industry.

    It's not just the actors, it's the whole entertainment industry that's doomed.

    Look, it's all about money and synthetic actors will always be cheaper. Eventually they'll be better. Even more eventually, your humble home computer will be able to cobble up a personalized drama, comedy, rom com or whatever you want, on command and there will be no more Hollywood, Bollywood or anything like a centralized entertainment industry.

    Like the T800 in terminator, this can't be stopped. I

    • Even more eventually, your humble home computer will be able to cobble up a personalized drama, comedy, rom com or whatever you want, on command and there will be no more Hollywood, Bollywood or anything like a centralized entertainment industry.

      I think this disregards the social aspect of consuming media. Game of Thrones, for example, wasn't a cultural phenomenon just because it was quality entertainment. It was also the fact that (seemingly) everyone was watching. You'd hear jokes about it on late night, talk to coworkers about it over the water cooler, etc. That's lost in the decentralized world you describe.

      • Yes and no. When thousands of amateurs are cranking out films for free and posting them publicly, some of them will be more popular than others.

    • Look, it's all about money and synthetic actors will always be cheaper. Eventually they'll be better.

      This is to me a stretch, or rather completely unfounded. Good actors are good for a variety of reasons, and one is the creative decisions they bring to the process. They do more than just read the lines, and more than just read the lines with emotion.

      Eventually they'll be better. Even more eventually, your humble home computer will be able to cobble up a personalized drama, comedy, rom com or whatever you wa

      • > There's nothing to indicate it can or will produce anything remotely approaching an interesting new take on anything.

        You may be correct. I doubt it will matter much. As Mencken in 1938 said, ""No one in this world, so far as I know... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

    • Not to mention the porn industry.

      It's not just the actors, it's the whole entertainment industry that's doomed.

      I've seen AI generated shorts on YouTube with Marvel and DC characters that are far more visually appealing than anything I've seen in a Marvel or DC movie. This is going to be a losing effort by Hollywood in the long run.

  • Gee... There is a new technology that automates something people do and get paid for. The people currently doing it don't like it because it "puts people out of work."

    There are no examples where efforts to block or ban a technology were successful. Maybe this will be the first time!

  • Still a niche product it seems. (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Sunday October 05, 2025 @10:46PM (#65706066)

    It would seem that Tilly Norwood is not quite ready to be accepted on the silver screen.

    Meanwhile, her slutty twin sister Titty Morewood has eleventy-seven gazillion subscribers on OF, and is generating revenue measured in GDP..

    • Meanwhile we won't hear OnlyFans models complaining about losing work. I'm sure they'll complain, we just won't hear it because we'll be busy jerking off to AI
  • Anything that makes the elite (specially the useless elite) is great imnsho

  • How is the AI training? By watching the movie, just like a human would do. So the AI should compensate just like the human, by paying the movie ticket.

  • They write as if the AI could just show up on set to ninja someone's gig, without a user instructing it to generate video.

    Comparing computer generated imagery to a person is misguided at best. Don't anthropomorphise computers, they hate that.

    There is still a team of professional workers behind Tilly, making those vids. Even if no actor is required. Which means there is now a whole team "replacing" one actress.

    And the SAG act as if that was somehow a threat? Do they want to encourage the producers to not

  • Dogs were some of the most popular characters in early cinema. Rin-Tin-Tin may have been the most popular "actor" in Hollywood for a few years. Everybody (mostly) can relate to a dog, and conversely, a dog can relate to everybody. AI is the opposite of going to the dogs. Rover has no interest in AI as it has no animal nature. Nor should people. Oh sure, a dog-feeding robot would get Rover's attention, but that's about it. No licks. Those cats that ride Roombas don't nuzzle up to them. The T-1000 did not foo

  • "To be clear, "Tilly Norwood" is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program"

    We can't have that!

    We now have a system that gives us actresses with fake hair, fake teeth, fake nose, fake eyebrows, fake eye-lashes, lenses with fake eye-color, skin covered in pancake make-up, tummy tucked and so on.

    All natural, unlike that robot.

  • ... Until they can figure out how to wring union dues from AI systems, anyway.

    • I think SAG just needs to let it join. To me, that seems like the only fair solution. No other actor has to pay other actors for the "training" gleaned through watching other actors act. They do have to pay union dues, which in theory helps support other actors.

  • They also make cuts no human can perform on a manual machine tool and are immensely productive, enabling ubiquitous manufacture of useful goods not otherwise practical, including semiconductors and all BEVs.

    The knowledge used to design them is in great part a legacy of manual machining. Workers displaced by CNC didn't riot like Luddites, they learned to operate and maintain modern machine tools while those unable to adapt sought work elsewhere.

  • A more interesting question I think is, does anyone own this AI actress?

    That is to say - if a company took her likeness, and used other AI to make porn - could "her" agent sue them?

    Or in other words, is a purely AI generated likeness even copyrightable, when technically no human made it?

  • "audiences aren't interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience" said every animated movie producer?
    What planet are these people from? "Casper", "Toy Story", "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" obviously must have gone under their radar.
  • If an AI's shape is is based on an ideal human form, it will look similar to many actors and actresses who are popular because they also approach ideality. Now, ideality is to some extent a cultural artifact, changing slightly as the decades go by, but always constrained by human physiology. Can an actor whose popularity has influenced the ideal be said to own some aspect of ideality? For how long?

    There's also the issue of personal style, how someone moves and speaks, which is the basis of caricature
  • Lawyers, Doctors, Teachers, Screenwriters, Authors, and Actors are all very concerned about AI. I'm glad. I want them to be. They think AI is my problem as a coder, but I've got news for them: AI does your job better than it does mine. I hope it puts every one of the fuckers out of business quickly and permanently (especially public school teachers and doctors). I saw their true colors during CV1984 and now I want them put into the same internment camps they wanted to put me into. Short of that, losing your

  • I fail to understand why something needs to be trained on actors, when actors are usually very imperfectly trying to appear to be actual people in their roles. Why not just train on people?

  • Is using finding people indistinguishable from popular personalities then using their likenesses for compensated AI training unethical or illegal? How so?

    If I look like a famous actor and use or permit use of my likeness to train AI, is that actor being ripped off or am I inspired by my opportunity?

  • It's CGI. Now, unless you want to call Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse actors...

  • In economics, the Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth. In turn, these sectors of the economy become more expensive over time, because the input costs increase while productivity does not. Typically, this affects services more than manufactured goods, and in particular health, education, arts and culture. Baumol Effect [wikipedia.org]

    Actor salaries have had a tendency to rise over time due to the above even though actor productivity has not risen over time. AI raises the possibility of increasing productivity in the movie industry which will have an effect on the relative growth of actor salaries. That is what this dispute is all about.

  • Have an AI Actress/Actor (represented by an AI Agent), creating an AI generated movie, directed and produced by an AI director and AI producer, and watched by an AI generated audience.
  • SAG-AFTRA successfully argued that they were owed a portion of every blank CD-R sold as well as personal audio devices, media centers, satellite radio devices, and car audio systems that have recording capabilities, because it MIGHT be used for piracy. The US government collected the revenue it, and paid it out to the actor's union and RIAA for many years, and would have done the same based on the storage capacity of your cell phone and other digital devices if that specific issue wasn't preempted by anoth

  • The more they protest, the more people will want to see the first movie with Norwood.

  • ...the solution is for an AI Agent to represent her/it.

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