Could Tilly Norwood, an actress created entirely by artificial intelligence, replace Claudia Cardinale?

FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE - Last Saturday, the first actress created entirely by artificial intelligence, named Tilly Norwood, was introduced. According to director François Margolin, she should be particularly appealing to big, standardized productions that have abandoned what makes cinema so special.

François Margolin is a director, producer and screenwriter. He notably directed the film Sarah Halimi, an anti-Semitic and unpunished crime (2023).

There has been a big stir in Hollywood in the last few days, as a Dutch production company has announced with great fame that it is "launching" an actress, Tilly Norwood, made entirely of artificial intelligence, or AI. The head of this company, Eline Van der Velden, accompanied this launch with a 90-second trailer featuring this "actress", exclusively in the style of the Marvel productions that have been making California studios a fortune for several years.

The immediate consequence: agents have reportedly signed on to look after the creature's future career. It seems like a dream, but it's not. In fact, it's to be expected. This artificial intelligence that everyone is talking about has been replacing many professions in the film industry for some time now. It started with subtitlers, whose profession has been replaced by apps that do their long and complex work in minutes. It continued with dubbers: you should know that you can now mimic anyone's voice with artificial intelligence and give any character the vocal texture of Humphrey Bogart or Emmanuel Macron.

This has been true for extras for years: you can "fill" a stadium with 80,000 people without using any human, only special effects called VFX (visual effects). This saves considerable time and money. It's also used to build sets by giving free rein to your imagination and without paying anyone other than the machine and its programmer, in big Hollywood productions that combine sci-fi, action, destruction, carnage and imaginary weapons. These productions are heavily inspired by video games, unless they are directly transferred to the big screen.

The American screenwriters went on strike, which led to the stoppage of many filming sessions. They feared that the studios would cancel their exorbitant salaries and replace them with ChatGPT. It must be said that in this type of film, actors are not very important. They often work with so-called "green screens" that allow for all these special effects, and they often don't see their partners when they talk to them. Yet they are the "money machines" of today's cinema, generating hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, in worldwide revenue. "Wonder Woman," "Aquaman," "Ant-Man" and "Black Panther" are just a few examples.

Things got complicated when the American screenwriters went on strike a little over two years ago, leading to the closure of many films and TV series. They feared that studios would dispense with their services and exorbitant salaries and replace them with ChatGPT. They weren't wrong, because AI will write a script based on a simple story idea - I recently experienced this myself - in a matter of tens of minutes. A task that would take months for an experienced screenwriter. The result, of course, is not exceptional and carries all sorts of clichés, because the principle of this type of application is to rework, bit by bit, what has already been written, not to mention the psychology of the characters, which is nothing very original.

Yet there was a lot of hypocrisy in this strike, which resulted in a victory of sorts for the writers when the studios committed to doing without AI sources from now on. But as one of our recent presidents said (quoting his minister, Charles Pasqua), "Promises are only binding on those who believe them." Worse, a recent investigation revealed that many of these striking screenwriters, who were interviewed on condition of anonymity, were themselves using AI to write the scripts they submitted to their employers.

And then, fortunately, we'll still have the document. I can't imagine anyone outside of the specialized offices of the FSB and the CIA being able to recreate, even with the use of artificial intelligence, the reality of the world around us and the reality that comes out of the mouths of those who speak or are interviewed in it. That is quite reassuring for the future.

LeFigaro/gnews.cz-jav