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The New York Times is getting torn apart by readers after its magazine published a “profile” of the AI “actress” Tilly Norwood.
“I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood,” the article headline reads.
The sub-headline builds on this anthropomorphizing framework: “The AI actress on her craft, the future of film and how she definitely does not intend to murder us.”
Tilly Norwood, for those unfamiliar, is the brainchild of former actress Eline Van der Velden, who founded anAI firm calledParticle 6 Productions. The AI creation was unveiled last year to near-universal backlash from audiences, and importantly, actual performers. (Beloved character actor Ralph Ineson had a succinct response: “F*ck off.”)
At this point you may be asking yourself: how does a profile of an AI model even work? It’s a question that the NYT journalist, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, grapples with throughout the nearly 8,000 word piece, digesting the absurdity of the exercise while unpacking some of the tech’s dispiriting implications for the industry.
It’s far from a paean to AI, in other words, and Brodesser-Akner humorously pokes holes in the AI industry’s promises. But many readers were appalled that the NYT was giving such a huge platform to the AI venture in the first place, on top of the insult of framing it as an actual celebrity profile.
“Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a wonderful TV writer… and marched with us during the writers strike. The fact that she wrote this op-ed is just so damn disappointing,” lamented one Redditor. “Yes it’s farcical, yes it’s skewering the whole idea but that doesn’t take away from the fact that she’s giving oxygen to this cruel and demeaning fever dream of the anti-art oligarchy.”
“Taffy is an extraordinary novelist with a very clear eye, I’m surprised she agreed to this. Yes, its written with a satirical, tongue in cheek tone but it’s disappointing that she wasted so much time on an obvious publicity stunt,” another wrote.
The NYT comment section was no less forgiving.
“An AI actress? There exists no such thing, no more than an AI journalist or an AI plumber or an AI horse,” reads one representative comment with over 1,500 likes. “Words have meanings and distinctions, the importance of which journalism should be attentive to. Especially in the incipient age of AI.”
To be fair to Brodesser-Akner, she seems to come to the same conclusion in her piece, as she reckons with the soulless artifice of Tilly Norwood. (Though short-on-patience readers may wonder if it really warranted thousands of words and a huge treatment on the NYT’s magazine to get to there.)
“And Tilly is just a computer,” she writes, repeating a mantra that she tells herself throughout the profile. “The longer this story went on, the more tired I was. At first I thought it was jet lag. But as time passed I realized that it was something else. It was the feeling of being at a computer all day,” she wrote. “It was the subject matter. It was trying to dig to the depths of something and not finding any.”
This prompts further introspection on her career and the nature of art. The reason she profiles artists, Brodesser-Akner reflects, is “to understand the person who made the art, which is just as essential as the art itself.”
“There’s an entire conversation about separating the art from the artist, but maybe the conversation persists because we know we can’t do it. The art is the person,” she concludes.
Ergo, Tilly Norwood can’t be art? No, but she could be slop, Brodesser-Akner warns.
“You couldn’t put Tilly in ‘Citizen Kane.’ But you could put her in a streaming show that’s built to be half-watched from beyond the lip of your laptop while you do other things, produced by entertainment executives more concerned with churn than artistry.”
Now that’s a horrible thought.
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