Dear Gossips,
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is one of the best celebrity profilers in the business, especially during a time in which celebrities do not like and often resist giving profiles. But how can you forget her incredibly raw, intimate profile of Tom Hiddleston on the heels of his very public split with Taylor Swift? Or how she turned Bradley Cooper’s unwillingness to be interviewed into the interview itself? Or her profile of Gwyneth Paltrow and how goop was fueled by haterade?
TBA is a rarified writer, a celebrity journalist who can still get a good story out of celebrities when they are at their most dead boring and reticent. So, naturally, she was sent to interview (“interview”) AI-generated “actress” Tilly Norwood. You simply must read this profile for yourself. It was published on Sunday, I’ve read it four times now, I am absolutely haunted by it.
Because media literacy is dead, and apparently literacy literacy is dead, too, some have accused TBA of AI boosterism, or of glazing Tilly Norwood, as the kids say. But TBA’s “profile” of Tilly Norwood is hardly positive. Her refrain of Tilly is just a computer is not reassuring or encouraging or excited or any positive thing. It’s a reduction. Tilly is JUST a computer. There is no Tilly, there is JUST computer. And computer is not interesting. Computer is just computer. At best, computer is a digital parrot, a rapidly improving mimic that still lacks a parrot’s color and personality. Computer is nothing. Computer is remarkable only for the cliff it is pushing us toward.
By the end of the profile TBA sounds completely defeated. Her final lines are what haunt me, a line as good and resounding as any of the great closing lines in English literature: “There is nothing like people. That is what I’ll remember about us, how interesting we were.”
How interesting we WERE.
Past tense. Because what TBA excavates through her “interview” with Tilly Norwood, a collection of pixels and algorithms given a name by its creator, Dutch actress and designer Eline van der Velden, is that this technology is inherently hollow, that Tilly will never be as interesting as Eline van der Velden herself, and that the tragedy of Tilly is that Eline is finally getting the breaks she longed for as an actress by giving movement and marketing to a computer. Eline wants people to see Tilly as a tool like any other in a filmmaker’s toolbox, Eline will not reconcile with the notion that she has buried her own career in Tilly’s façade. One day Tilly will not need Eline, and then where will Eline be? How interesting she was, they might say, if anyone even remembers the person behind the pixels.
This reminds me of the quote by the late great Kurt Vonnegut, which also haunts me for its prescience: “…we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
I asked the writer Tom Robbins once if he had any advice for a young writer, and he said, “Stand in lines.” Stand in lines? “Meet people,” he elaborated. “Stand in lines. Talk to diner waitresses. Ride buses. Encounter the masses.” I am now a not-so-young writer, and I make regular trips to the post office to buy stamps I don’t need just so I can stand in a line and talk to the ladies who work the counter (they think I’m a philatelist and they’re always offering me the latest and greatest in stamp couture. We also talk about The Pitt). I go to the bank and deposit paper checks and catch up on gossip with the teller (shout out Rudy!!). I ride public transit with my headphones off, ears open to the world. I have never been poorer for following Tom Robbins’ advice.
We’re dancing animals. We are meant to engage, to be mischievous, to see and do and go and talk and hear and f-ck and love and hurt and forgive and learn and grow. Computers cannot do any of this. Maybe someday something will come from a computer, and it will be able to do some of these things, but it will never do all of them. It will do other things, and it will be another kind of creature, but it will not be human. It will relate to us, probably, like we relate to dogs. If we’re lucky, we’ll get along just as well. But it will never be us. Why are we in such a rush to replace US?
I live in the world.
I LIVE in the world.
I live IN the world.
I don’t want a computer to do and think for me, to perform and amuse me, because I don’t want to stop living. Do you?
Click here to read TBA’s piece. And join us at The Squawk for a deeper dive. (App link here.)
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
Photo credits: Ray Tamarra/Shutterstock
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.laineygossip.com ’
