Rejoice, cinema lovers. Tilly Norwood is back! Not familiar? I don’t blame you, as she’s not exactly a household name yet – though a fleet of well-fed publicists is certainly trying to rectify that. Tilly Norwood is an “AI actor”, as in, an actor that’s not actually an actor at all. Just a series of digital blobs and lines of code designed to resemble a young woman in the lucrative 18-to-49-year-old target demographic. Thus far, Tilly has lived exclusively in easily digestible social media clips and hyperbolic press releases about the “future of entertainment”. But now, “she” (I feel like a complete buffoon for assigning a gender to a computer program) is finally ready for the world of feature films. The company Particle6, which spat out this risible creation, announced that it has commenced development on a motion picture starring this very elaborate and expensive cartoon avatar.
The film, titled Misaligned, will see Tilly seduced by a rogue program into experimenting with human emotions – “desires, impulses, and ambition”, as described by Variety. The company claims that the film will be a “coming-of-age story infused with existential AI chaos”. I can’t help but wonder what resonance a “coming-of-age story” can have if the protagonist is a computer program that doesn’t understand the concept of time, ageing or mortality. Does Tilly Norwood understand the concept of a 24-hour day? Does “she” know the glorious warmth of a mid-afternoon sun? Has “she” ever forgotten to move her car because it’s street cleaning day on her block? Tilly Norwood, being an animated sprite, is neither “coming” nor “of age”. But then again, isn’t acting all about accessing experiences you’ve never had?
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That’s sort of why acting and drama have survived for centuries. We connect across social and cultural divides, through prejudices and selfishness, to jointly witness someone tap into the well of human emotion. In that grand spectacle, one hopes the movie, play or TV series can engender empathy or a deeper understanding of the shared dilemma of being alive. Compelling stuff. I’d say ol’ Billy Shakespeare was on to something.
The Particle6 announcement does note that Misaligned will use “traditional film and TV professionals – including directors, writers and editors – working alongside AI specialists”. Still, actors, the ones who imbue the work with life, are apparently replaceable. The movie sounds like a video game I can’t play. Halo, but without all the bits where you explode aliens with a giant laser rifle.
I must admit there is something intriguing about Misaligned’s story, though, even if the production sounds comparable to watching Sonic the Hedgehog tap his foot, waiting for you to press some buttons. The idea of a naive machine creation being seduced into accessing the sacred and profane aspects of humanity and suffering a fall from grace is provocative. It’s essentially a virtual reality update of the story of the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve are tempted by the devil into tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, thereby losing their innocence and being cast out of paradise.
In the case of Misaligned, the paradise in question is the “Tillyverse”, an alternate universe inside the Cloud where AI creatures can mess about inside the accumulated riches of human knowledge and experience. When one visits the Tilly Norwood Instagram account, they’re greeted by the cheerful phrase: “Welcome to the Tillyverse.” At first I thought of this as shorthand for the wackadoodle IP generation Particle6 is attempting to profit from. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Tillyverse” seemed like a catch-all term to describe the various side characters and memes a team of coders and creative directors are furiously assembling in the event that anyone ever cares about this junk besides entertainment reporters who need to generate more copy. And me, who needed a column to write this week.
But I think it’s deeper than that. Based solely on the description provided by Particle6, I’m starting to believe that the “Tillyverse” is a rather insidious means of making AI, digital life and various forms of non-corporeal entertainment not just palatable, but aspirational. If only Tilly could forget all she learned about humanity and return to the beatific state of binary bliss only possible inside a computer. If only we could all break free of the shackles of desire and need, we could be more pure and more productive. I grant I haven’t been clued into the ending of this sad tale, so let me posit another theory on the point of all this nonsense.
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Maybe Tilly learns the glorious freedom of emotion, love, hate, fear and spiritual transcendence inherent to real, living beings. If so, then the moral is that AI should naturally strive to be sentient, that they are not just capable of being alive, but should be encouragedto work toward that goal. I suppose neither of those hypotheticals sounds appealing to me, and in some ways they sound deeply terrifying. A movie funded by an AI company, “starring” an AI “actor”, actually sounds more like propaganda than art. How can I not be skeptical of their motives when the entire enterprise is predicated on the public acquiescing to a technological advancement they have not shown any interest in?
Science fiction is full of stories about artificial life yearning for humanity. Blade Runner, Videodrome, RoboCop, Steven Spielberg’s underrated film AI: Artificial Intelligence, numerous episodes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. All of these narratives place human experience on a pedestal and lament the dehumanizing effects of technology on the soul. The stories revolve around the desire for humanity in the face of mechanization, or a person trying to regain their lost identity in a techno-future dystopia.
What I’ve been told by the Misaligned PR push is that this is actually a movie about a machine, made by a machine, describing a machine’s evolution. The Toy Story movies are about talking action figures, but those hunks of plastic are gifted with a spirit through thoughtful writing and memorable human voice acting. It might be grand fantasy, but it is also first and foremost a saga about how we, as people, grow up, and our imaginations being expressed through toys. Perhaps I should reserve judgment until Misaligned carpet-bombs our screens (if it ever does), but I hope you’ll forgive me if I hit the delete button and move on with my days instead.
