British actress Jameela Jamil slammed the rise of artificial intelligence, especially the emergence of AI “actor” Tilly Norwood, in the entertainment industry, calling the technology “deeply disturbing.”
Jamil appeared at the Web Summit in Lisbon and took a hard line against the burgeoning AI threat to entertainment, according to Deadline.
“I can’t understand it in the television and film space because the whole point of acting is to emulate the human experience and so having something that is not human trying to emulate our experience is not possible,” she insisted. “I find it deeply disturbing and troubling and shame on the agencies that sign these actresses.”
The Good Place star was also very displeased with the AI “actress” called Tilly Norwood — an AI creation by a company named Particle6 — that programmers had hoped to shop around to talent agencies. But Jamil saw a very frightening example of exploitation in this AI creation. Many actors have risen up against Tilly Norwood, and Jamil is among the latest to do so.
“Shame on it being a teenage-looking girl who can’t say no to a type of sex scene or to a sexual abuse scene, who can’t advocate for herself, who can’t advocate for more money. It’s marked that it was a young woman, rather than a man that they came out with first and that she looks a particular way. I find the whole thing deeply disturbing,” she said.
The She-Hulk star admitted that AI may offer some useful applications to humanity elsewhere, but not in the entertainment industry.
“When it comes to art or things that are fundamentally human, there’s no place for something that has been coded by some greedy psychopath in Silicon Valley,” she said.
She added that she mourns for the actual artists being replaced by AI.
“I can’t think of anything sadder than replacing these people and these departments with a computer by someone who isn’t an artist. I hope to never have to engage with it,” she lamented.
In the end, she blasted AI as a net evil for humanity.
“I think it’s robbing us of our autonomy. I think it’s robbing us of our self-confidence. I think that we don’t pay attention to who is funding AI so therefore we don’t which way the information or data is leaning,” she said. “So, I just think we have to have immense guardrails around it and we have to make sure that the people we have in charge of this beast that is going to destroy our planet have some semblance of care for humanity and I haven’t yet seen that already demonstrated.”
Not all actors, though, are standing against the advancement of AI. In fact, top actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have just signed deals with an AI company to allow them to reproduce their voices.
Still, Jamil has a point. It has already been estimated that AI has permanently eliminated up to 200,000 jobs and climbing to artificial intelligence. This isn’t news that the studios are willing to talk about.
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