In the immortal words of Emily Blunt, “Good Lord, we’re screwed.”
She was on a podcast with Variety Monday when she was handed a headline about cinema’s latest sensation, Tilly Norwood.
Agents are circling the hot property, a fresh-faced young British brunette actress who is attracting global attention.
Norwood is A.I., and Blunt is P.O.’d. In fact, she says, she’s terrified.
Told that Tilly’s creator, Eline Van der Velden, a Dutch former actress with a master’s in physics, wants her to be the next Scarlett Johansson, Blunt protested, “But we have Scarlett Johansson.” (Cue the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” music.)
All over Hollywood, actresses are cursing Tilly, her Pygmalion, Van der Velden, and the increasingly withdrawn men who prefer to be turned on by eternally youthful and preternaturally gorgeous A.I. replicas. (No Botox or Ozempic needed.)
And all over Hollywood, suits are licking their chops at the prospect of more malleable actors. “She’s not going to talk back,” one top talent wrangler told me dryly.
They may be alarmed by one A.I. actress now, but as the A.I. expert Nate Soares, a co-author of the best seller “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” explains, “A.I. is less like one actress and more like a puppeteer behind lots of different characters.”
Checking out Tilly’s image, Blunt was clearly nettled. “That is really, really scary,” she told Variety. “Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”
I fear it’s too late.
Human connections have been eroding for some time. We’re all dwelling in Uncanny Valley now, staring into our personal screens, not sure what’s real or fake, to the detriment of talking, dating, reading, living.
We’re getting another jolt about how fast A.I. is advancing. Just this past week, we’ve been inundated with racist, juvenile videos posted by Donald Trump, mocking Democratic leaders as the government shut down. The president is wallowing in A.I. slop.
Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, debuted his Sora app, which creates alarmingly realistic videos of fake scenes. It could be TikTok with a lot more disinformation. You can use a text prompt to conjure terrorist attacks, election fraud, mass protests, war scenes and, no doubt, disturbing sexual scenarios.
“Increasingly realistic videos are more likely to lead to consequences in the real world by exacerbating conflicts, defrauding consumers, swinging elections or framing people for crimes they did not commit, experts said,” The New York Times reported.
The app will further erode truth, and comity. This, in a country where the president sets a horrible example promoting false narratives and fake videos, and where nearly two-thirds of voters believe we’re too politically divided to solve our problems.
Sora will certainly be used by some to justify rejecting real content as fake. “Until recently,” the Times story noted, “videos were reasonably reliable as evidence of actual events, even after it became easy to edit photographs and text in realistic ways. Sora’s high-quality video, however, raises the risk that viewers will lose all trust in what they see, experts said.”
Although many in Tinseltown are upset by Tilly and Sora, A.I. will most likely make swift inroads in a degraded Hollywood. Largely gone are the days of blazing movie stars and prestige mass-appeal movies. (Sydney Sweeney already looks suspiciously like A.I.) Now it’s Marvel, sequels, adaptations and streaming shows that feel as though they were written by an algorithm for consumption while scrolling on another screen.
“I get it even though I don’t like it,” said Lola Kirke, the actress and author of “Wild West Village,” essays about New York and her eccentric and creative family. “It’s a business, after all, and they have to keep up with the preferences and demands of the public, who are more used to watching face-tuned influencers lip sync ‘Real Housewives of New York’ sound bites for 15 seconds than actors telling stories over the course of three acts. Maybe, in some weird way, it will revitalize interest in film and TV? That’s me being optimistic — albeit in a sad way.”
The less optimistic view was provided by Jaron Lanier, a top scientist at Microsoft.
He said that a Hollywood studio chief was crowing about how great A.I. is because he wouldn’t have to pay “all these idiot producers and actors and lighting people and composers and writers and agents.” Lanier told him that studio chiefs would quickly become expendable, too, because everyone will serve at the mercy of “the big computer server at the center, and Silicon Valley will just roll right over you.”
While Lanier thinks a simulated character here and there is fine, he says it’s “urgent” to draw the line about “the difference between A.I.-generated stuff and reality-generated stuff, to have a system in which we know what’s real and what’s fake.”
He told me: “The problem with it is, if you make the whole world run by fakes and simulations, everybody becomes increasingly more dysfunctional. Everybody becomes alienated and nervous and unsure of their own value, and the whole thing falls apart, and at some point, it’s like civilizational and species collapse.”
That, readers, would be less than ideal.
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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