Hollywood is about to be flooded with A.I. actors and videos.

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We may not have real movie stars anymore, but we’ll soon have computer-generated “actors” as our aspirational celebrities instead. At least, that’s the future imagined by Particle6 Productions and its founder, the (real) Dutch-British actress Eline Van der Velden, who talked about her nonhuman “acting” avatar, Tilly Norwood, at the Zurich Film Festival on Saturday.

In a panel discussion, Van der Velden gushed about Particle6’s new artificial intelligence lab, Xicoia, and its upcoming roster of “hyperreal digital stars,” as Deadline characterizes them. The actress-entrepreneur also added that Tilly Norwood, who “starred” in a company-produced sketch video back in July, may be signing to a talent agency.

“When we first launched Tilly, people were like, ‘What’s that?,’ and now we’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months,” Van der Velden told the crowd in Switzerland.

Having signed nondisclosure agreements with her clients, Van der Velden kept mum on further details. Hollywood, however, did not. Almost immediately after the event was reported, myriad human actors, including Toni Collette and Mara Wilson, expressed their objections to the whole affair on social media, demanding that the interested agents expose themselves. Particle6’s “A.I. Commissioner” sketch, which marked Tilly’s first on-screen appearance, was resurfaced and deluged with negative comments on YouTube, as was a puffy Broadcast International writeup where Van der Velden had called her virtual bot “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.” (Clearly, she hasn’t paid much attention to how much ScarJo herself loathes A.I. replicas.)

Older posts from the gimmick Instagram account Particle6 made for Tilly, which includes the tag “#aiart” in its bio, also faced down a blitz of comment bombs, with Yvette Nicole Brown demanding that a clear A.I. label “should be on every single post.” (Many of the comments from these prior posts have since been scrubbed; Tilly also has a thus-far inactive profile on Pinterest.) By Sunday, Van der Velden had responded with a text graphic shared on both her and Tilly’s Insta accounts where she explained that Tilly “is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work—a piece of art.” (Cue the many visual artists and other creatives who dispute the notion that auto-generations constitute art.) “I also believe AI characters should be judged as part of their own genre, on their own merits,” the statement continued.

That didn’t quell the anger. On Monday’s episode of The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg pontificated on the matter for an entire segment, reading from Van der Velden’s apology before going in for the takedown. “You are suddenly up against something that’s been generated with 5,000 other actors,” said Goldberg. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to hold on because what this means is A.I. in the workplace—not just my workplace, but in every industry.” The drama continued into Tuesday: Talent agency Gersh dismissed the idea that it would sign a Tilly-style generation anytime soon, and the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, pointing to the recent strikes that won its members protections against A.I. likenesses, reiterated that Tilly “is not an actor” and noted that, “from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.” Van der Velden has purged many of the responses she’s earned on Instagram, but the posts with live comments are still fielding the haters as of the time of this writing, including two short videos from February that resulted from her experiments with OpenAI’s popular video generator, Sora.

While Van der Velden has been testing the waters with her A.I. avatar, OpenAI is rolling out a new version of its video engine that could flood our feeds with automated, IP-informed slop—and it’s already forcing the entertainment industry into defensive mode. In anticipation of its latest model, Sora 2, the Sam Altman–led nonprofit “began alerting talent agencies and studios” that the updated generative video engine would produce “videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “While copyright characters will require an opt-out, the new product won’t generate images of recognizable public figures without their permission,” the report continues. OpenAI has struck deals with certain studios to prevent its tools from generating copyrighted characters, but it isn’t allowing artists or studios to fully opt out their catalogs:. “Instead, it sent some talent agencies a link to report violations that they or their clients discover,” the report said.

A now deleted comment from actor Lesley-Ann Brandt on Tilly Norwood’s Instagram post.
Screenshot by Nitish Pahwa

For example, Marvel might get Spider-Man protected under one of these special agreements, so users can’t generate him in Sora. But if an independent comic book artist doesn’t want any of their work imitated, OpenAI won’t preemptively block it—forcing the artist to wait until a user makes something in their style, find it amid the morass of A.I.-overridden network feeds, and then file a manual report to have that image taken down.

That whack-a-mole style of copyright flagging is a strange approach. Disney, one of the companies known to have barred its intellectual property from Sora output, is currently suing image-generator Midjourney over its careless ability to spit out the copyright material on which it’s been trained. But, just like when it rushed out its “Sky” voice assistant in spite of concerns over its similarity with Scarlett Johansson’s voice, OpenAI is seeking neither forgiveness nor permission.

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Sora 2 launched to the public on an invite- and subscriber-only basis on Tuesday, just a day after the Journal’s story published online, with the addition of a TikTok-style short-form video feed where users can share their generations. Copyright lawyer Aaron Moss noticed that he was still able to generate replications of certain Disney-owned characters (King of the Hill’s Hank Hill, Family Guy’s Peter Griffin) although he was blocked from producing others (Mickey Mouse, Homer Simpson). Moss also found that Sora 2’s “cameo” feature, which allows users to insert generated versions of themselves into videos, makes it far easier for Sora customers—as opposed to rightsholders and their works—to control how they’re portrayed on the app. A tech enthusiast who already pays for ChatGPT’s premium models can quickly determine their boundaries by offering or withdrawing their consent in the settings; once-powerful studios and talent agencies have to just try to limit instances of copyright infringement hit by hit, video by video, even as these outputs are offered free rein across the slop troughs of Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.

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Hollywood is getting absolutely rolled here. It’s barely an open secret that the film and TV industries are already using generative A.I. under the radar (sometimes to patronize an “ethically” trained machine), with the attendant effects felt by visual workers who once anchored so much of mass media. But if certain entertainment executives and celebrities think they’ll be able to save themselves by openly embracing auto-generation, they are fools. OpenAI and other tech firms are already seizing upon legal uncertainties and long-tied, slow-moving court cases to declare any of their actions and business moves fair game; it helps they have friends in the Trump administration who loathe liberal Hollywood and are sympathetic to their A.I.-accelerationist arguments, whether for the sake of beating China or propping up our fragile economy or ensuring that the burn of billions upon billions upon billions of dollars won’t singe them too much.

The fact that Tilly Norwood and the company behind ChatGPT are simultaneously engendering such controversy is not a coincidence: This is an existential moment for human-created entertainment as we know it. If actors, talent bookers, and studio executives cannot hold the line now, at this very moment, the battle to preserve the humanity inherent to art will be irredeemably set back. Which might just be OK by you if you really do enjoy stuff like this:

Using SORA 2 just as god (Sam Altman) intended us to 🙏😌 pic.twitter.com/zDuzSAYFeZ

— ali (@endingwithali) October 1, 2025

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