We need to get our pronouns right.
Tilly Norwood has made an entrance to Hollywood as the first artificial intelligence-generated “actress” marketed to talent studios for film. Based on the handful of clips available to the public, the avatar seems as boring as it is perfect.
It’s too soon to tell how Norwood and the so-called “AI actors” who follow it will affect the entertainment industry and the livelihoods of human actors. The Collegian’s Culture section has offered several student filmmakers’ responses to the potential of AI usage in film and entertainment this week. But the more pressing question for the rest of us is how we talk about it.
Norwood is neither an “actress” nor a “she.” It is a technological creation and should be referred to as such.
When newly launched AI talent studio Xicoia unveiled Norwood at the Zurich Film Festival in September, the media didn’t quite know what to call the new creation.
Economist Tyler Cowen made a joke of it in his article for The Free Press, “My Favorite Actress is not Human,” writing: “If you do not already know, Tilly is not an actual human being. She — it? — is an AI creation.” Cowen refers to Norwood as “she” throughout the rest of the piece.
Clare Duffy at CNN does not explicitly ask the question but oscillates between “it” and “she,” writing: “The character’s maker says it’s not meant to replace people … She’s pursuing an acting career — and recently posted about doing ‘screen tests’ in hopes of landing a gig.”
It doesn’t help that Norwood’s creator, Eline Van der Velden, refers to Norwood as “she” when marketing the creation as an aid to human creativity: “She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work — a piece of art.”
Sharon Waxman offers a better approach in her piece in The Atlantic, “Tilly Norwood is Not Ready for Its Closeup.” The founder of The Wrap News refers to Norwood as “it” throughout the piece, even when the substitution leads to awkward diction such as: “Norwood was clearly limited in its ability to credibly represent humanity on-screen.”
But a slight dissonance to the ear is worthwhile to preserve accuracy in language.
As George Orwell writes in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.”
While Orwell is specifically talking about political writing, the point extends to the abuse of the English language in general. The way we use language shapes the way we think. If our language becomes inaccurate, our thoughts will be skewed along the same lines.
The choice of a pronoun in this case will shape every subsequent conversation about AI “actors” like Norwood in ways the participants won’t realize or understand. The more we talk about Norwood as a “she,” the more we think of it as a human actress, on par with Scarlett Johansson or Emily Blunt, and the more easily these artists will be replaced in our minds.
The difference between “she” and “it” is the difference between attributing personhood to a technological creation and preserving a space for human artists in the field.
Moira Gleason is a senior studying English.
