Dutch comedian Eline van der Velden was living in Los Angeles in 2012 when she went to audition. Because she was repeatedly told that she needed to lose weight, she created a buffoonish character, “Miss Holland,” whose purpose was to mock unattainable beauty standards.
The character, conceived as a female version of Borat, won an online comedy award and was cast on BBC Three. So she conducted street experiments on unsuspecting Brits in the name of social commentary, using impromptu training and hidden camera video.
“You just have to do your job, so you don’t care so much about what everyone is saying or thinking all the time,” she told The Times of London. “You learn to overcome a lot of shame.”
All of that was just a prelude to Tilly Norwood, the doe-eyed actress introduced by van der Velden and her team in July. This two-minute intro video gently pokes fun at British television, gender politics, and artificial intelligence, all made with AI.
“Yes, this is satire,” van der Velden wrote on Instagram. “Yes, that’s surprisingly close to reality.”
The backlash didn’t come until two months later, when van der Velden suggested at a panel discussion in Zurich that “Tilly” would sign with an agency. She clearly wasn’t kidding. Nor was she trying to stir up controversy to promote her AI company, Particle 6, she says.
In an interview with Variety, she said that other digital characters also had agents.
“I didn’t think it was controversial,” she says.
Actors union SAG-AFTRA disagreed, accusing her of “disrespecting human artistry” and threatening actors’ jobs. Van der Velden countered, either sincerely or on a level of near-Swiftian satire, that no one’s work was affected and that Tilly Norwood required a different kind of many-man artistry.
“As a creator, it was really fun to create her,” she says. “It was like a writer creating a character. When you’re writing a character, you fall in love with the character. It’s a great process. It wasn’t like we created her in a flash and that was it. You know, it took a long time.”
In an interview, Van der Velden discusses the controversy from his own perspective and offers his thoughts on the future of AI filmmaking.
Have you ever experienced anything like this before in terms of attention and backlash?
No, I think it’s a first for me. I like to spark conversation and am not shy about controversy. But this was on another level.
In a statement on Instagram, you said your job has always been to hold up a mirror to society. These AI conversations tend to be less about the things themselves and more about people’s reactions to them. This is an X-ray of everyone’s anxiety. Does that mean?
We are always thinking about what we should do as a society. Miss Holland definitely did, and my new character will do the same, and even the fact that I’m thinking, “Where is our world going?” I think Tilly did a great job in sparking that conversation. I really hope this creative renaissance comes from the creative industries. We need to control it, not have it imposed on us by the tech industry. There will also be an AI actress, right? That’s natural. Tilly isn’t the first. Tilly isn’t taking anyone’s job. She actually created jobs. And there’s a lot of humanity and people behind her that people forget. It’s clearly nerve-wracking. This visceral reaction that people have towards her is part of why I created her. Because that’s where the world is heading, right? That’s why you can call it a work of art. It’s who we are in this moment, where we are, and how people feel.
I feel like there are several paths for AI. One is to use it for post-production, pre-production, mood boards, etc. And the other is an AI-generated movie. Are you pursuing both?
We experimented and learned and became experts in these tools. And we thought, “How can we use this? Is it just a little previs or a few scenes?” These are great little steps to start with. In other words, run a small test scene. But now we’re at the point where we can start delivering fully AI feature films. Now let’s move on.
As for the AI movie, SAG-AFTRA’s response is that there is no evidence that people actually want to see the movie. And I think the proof is in the evidence. Someone has to make something that people want to pay money to see, right? And that becomes indisputable.
I think it will be slow progress. Next year, we’ll see a lot of AI-powered effects. There are a few establishing shots, some second unit shots with AI, and then it slowly progresses into a full AI film. And I don’t think they’ll know the difference between whether people pay for an AI movie or not. Good storytelling is what makes people pay or not.
Where does your income come from? Commercials?
Particle 6 is focused on helping traditional filmmakers produce their work for less and produce higher quality at a lower cost. So we’re definitely doing commercials because the boundaries around that are decreasing. I am using AI to create commercials. In some cases, they may also be labeled. Over the past year, we’ve worked with many studios, production companies, and independent companies. Let’s say you have a great movie, but you only got 60% of the budget and you’re worried you won’t be able to make it. “Okay, let’s create some scenes in the AI. Let’s run a test project.” We do a test project with them, which is about a minute or two. And they say, “Oh, wow, this might actually work.” And then we go into full production with them and help them with even more scenes. And then there are our own creative pursuits. We’ve been producing shows for the BBC, Sky and all these big channels in the UK for the last 10 years. In the future, some things will be made using AI. So we are proposing an idea. For example, Sky History is a great new commission that we received. The show will be released in December. It is a hybrid show that combines real presenters and AI.
There was something on Channel 4 recently that said something along the lines of, “This whole show is about AI, and in fact I’m an AI-generated character.”
Yeah, they did an AI presenter. The difference is whether you can do AI well or you can do AI not very well. And that’s really where we want to be a premium brand for creating premium AI content.
There’s been some sort of backlash in the field of AI, and certainly in the marketing of AI. Do you know what a friend is? This is a little dongle that becomes your AI friend and will talk to you when you talk to it. There are also subway advertisements. People are so angry about this. But people are at least talking about it, so it ends up being effective marketing.
I don’t know. I really didn’t expect (the backlash). I’m in an AI bubble, right? I never realized how far people were from this technology. I live in another future. I work with these tools every day and these people don’t even know they can do it with the click of a button. In the UK, there was no reaction like there was in the US. In the UK, this kind of backlash didn’t exist. Because people understand that we’re using it as a force for good and that we’re trying to get more projects, we’re trying to tell more stories that wouldn’t be told in the UK. We are an ethical production company. We are trying to use AI tools to do the right thing.
Michelle Waldron, Public Relations: Your opinion on putting products out there for marketing purposes. Even before Tilly, Elaine was talking to great and good people who knew what they were doing in AI and wanted to learn. We have a huge influx of very well-known names, production companies, directors and other creators with projects who want to collaborate with Eline and her team. There are a large number of projects being discussed during development. None of them are ready for publication yet. Eline has hundreds of non-disclosure agreements. But there’s some real business to be announced by some very famous names over the next few months. So this is not a marketing issue. Tilly wasn’t a stunt or an exercise. This is part of our business strategy, and we are steadily seeing results.
Van der Velden: It’s funny that at one point everyone thought it was a stunt.
Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated character created by Particle 6.
via particle 6
I think people were responding to the idea that she was a human being and had agency rather than a composite character. I think that’s what people were afraid of, how they expressed it.
That’s my idea of Tilly, right? It’s not about building an empty image. You create the character completely, just like you would a character in a drama or TV series. We cannot leave them as empty shells. So we’re building a whole personality, her backstory, her brain. And that’s a creative pursuit. Building her full character is fascinating.
I think it was a deal with an agent, but you know it’s not a person, right? In this case, a contract cannot be concluded.
If you are creating a person or personality, you will want to have someone to manage all the inflows. We have a lot of projects going on right now and branded opportunities that will come up later as well. We still talk to many of them. But someone who really understands that the digital space is what we want.
It’s not going away, but anyone can create their own AI character, right? What you’re doing can be done in any studio you want.
This is the problem. Many people are trying. But it’s one thing to create someone who resonates with you, it’s another thing entirely to make that person look really good. Therefore, we encourage you to try out all of these tools. And once you start using these tools, you’re like, “Oh, this is pretty difficult.” And you’ll need a team of experts to work on the film and the characters. And then they come to us.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
