Dutch Comedian Who Created Tilly Norwood Defends AI Actress as "New Paintbrush"

If you've spent any time online lately, chances are you've seen her. She’s stylish, doe-eyed, and endlessly photogenic. Her name is Tilly Norwood. She, however, is not a real person. Now, that information is enough to make most people stop and ask one simple question. If she isn’t real, who created Tilly Norwood?

Furthermore, what exactly does an AI actress mean for the future of acting?

Well, here's the short version. Tilly is an AI-generated actress created by a Dutch comedian, actor, and technologist named Eline Van der Velden. Through her production company Particle6 and a spin-off studio called Xicoia, Eline designed Tilly as a “hyperreal digital star.”

Keep reading as we dive a bit deeper into who Tilly is and what her creator has to say about her.

Tilly didn’t show up in casting calls or on red carpets. She appeared online — on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — dropping casual selfies and breezy captions like “Hey besties,” as if she'd always been here. While audiences were still figuring out whether she was real, talent agents were already lining up.

Eline revealed that major agencies were already in talks to represent Tilly. Yes — represent her. As in, sign an AI-generated actress to the same kind of contracts human stars get.

“We’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months,” Eline said during a panel, according to Deadline.

That announcement? It hit like a script rewrite no one asked for. According to The Independent, Melissa Barrera called the whole thing “gross,” urging actors to dump any rep that signs AI talent.

Matilda star Mara Wilson took to Instagram to ask, “What about the hundreds of real women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?”

Nicholas Alexander Chavez had a blunt reaction: “Not an actress actually, nice try.” Even Lukas Gage took a tongue-in-cheek jab at the AI actress: “She was a nightmare to work with!”

Eline didn’t stay quiet. She jumped in with a statement of her own, posted directly to Instagram. “To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood.”

She penned in her lengthy Instagram response to the backlash. “She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work—a piece of art.” Her point? AI isn’t here to take jobs. It's just a new kind of paintbrush.

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been here before. Remember when people freaked out about CGI back in the 1990s? Or how some traditionalists pushed back against motion capture when Avatar first came out?

This feels like another chapter in that same story — one where technology and creativity collide, and no one’s totally sure where the line is.

Speaking alongside Verena Puhm, head of Luma AI’s Studio Dream Lab LA at the Zurich Summit, Eline explained how quickly the industry’s mood has shifted.

“In February, everyone said, ‘This won’t happen,’” she said. “By May? Studios were calling us.” According to both women, studios have already been quietly developing AI-driven projects, just waiting for the right moment to go public.

Eline’s not pretending Tilly is just a fun experiment. She knows this opens the door to bigger changes. But she’s clear on one thing: AI actors aren’t trying to be human — they’re trying to be something else entirely.

“AI characters should be judged as part of their own genre,” she said. “Each form of art has its place.”