Tilly Norwood Creator Eline Van der Velden on AI Actress Controversy

Eline Van der Velden, a Dutch comedian, was living in Los Angeles in 2012 and going out for auditions. After being told once too often that she needed to lose weight, she created “Miss Holland,” a buffoonish character meant to mock unattainable beauty standards.

Conceived as a female version of Borat, the character won her an online comedy award and landed her on BBC Three, where she used her improv training and hidden camera videos to conduct street experiments on unsuspecting Britons in the name of social commentary.

“You learn to just not care too much about what everybody is saying and thinking all the time because you just have to do your job,” she told the Times of London. “You learn to get over a lot of shame.”

All of that was mere prelude to Tilly Norwood, the doe-eyed actress introduced by Van der Velden and her team in July. The two-minute intro video poked gentle fun at British TV, gender politics, and artificial intelligence — and was made entirely with AI.

“Yes, it’s satire,” Van der Velden wrote on Instagram. “Yes, it’s disturbingly close to reality.”

The backlash didn’t hit until two months later, when Van der Velden suggested on a panel in Zurich that “Tilly” would be signing with an agency. She was not, evidently, joking. Nor, she says, was she trying to whip up controversy to promote her AI company, Particle 6.

In an interview with Variety, she notes that other digital characters have had agents.

“I didn’t think it was controversial,” she says.

The performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, disagreed, denouncing her for “devaluing human artistry” and threatening actors’ jobs. Van der Velden — either sincerely or at a level of satire approaching the Swiftian — countered that no one’s job was impacted and that Tilly Norwood required a lot of human artistry, just of a different kind.

“As a creative, I have really enjoyed creating her,” she…