March 18, 2026
The AI avatar dubbed Tilly Norwood made a big splash a couple of months ago in Hollywood, with Variety repeatedly featuring the AI-generated construct. Its creator, UK startup Particle6, framed it as an “AI actor.” Predictably, many in the film and TV business ridiculed the avatar and any hopes it might have of replacing human actors. Then, last week, the world got a taste of what Tilly was capable of via a music video titled “Take The Lead,” in which the avatar proclaimed “AI is not the enemy!”
Now, after 204,000 views on YouTube, we can finally get an accurate sense of how Tilly was received…and it’s not good. The video currently has 1.2k Likes and 4.8k Dislikes. Similarly, the comment section is filled with negative comments about the music (created using Suno), the quality of the avatar, and the very notion of attempting to replace humans with AI-generated avatars.
However, none of this is static and, depending on the project, opinions may change. But what the incident did tell me is that humans aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about letting go of reality. I experienced a hint of this during my many years researching and reporting on virtual reality. Although I was and remain thoroughly enthralled with VR, so far, the audience for virtual experiences seems to be limited. In fact, just this week, chief VR evangelist Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta company admitted defeat and sent a message to all Quest VR headset users that “By March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest.”
Is there a throughline between VR and AI? Will humans have the same instinctual revulsion to AI’s virtual humans and environments that many have had to VR? For AI, it’s early days, but the initial signals from film and TV fans indicate that selling AI-generated actors may face some challenges. For now, I think the most achievable beachhead in Hollywood for AI is in animation. Films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and KPop Demon Hunters feature so many innovative, non-traditional animation techniques that I can easily imagine an AI-generated animation film becoming one of the first breakthroughs in AI filmmaking. Perhaps the animation industry senses this, too, hence the passionate anti-AI call-out from animation voice actor Will Arnett (The Lego Movie) at this week’s Oscars ceremony.
When Flesh Is the Special Effect
And while film and TV are not in-real-life (IRL) experiences, they have served as proxies for such for audiences for over a century now. Watching humans, who we know exist in the real world, have worked as substitute reality for us for when we can’t or don’t want to expend the effort to mingle in meatspace. So is AI the next evolution of film and TV? Maybe. But increasingly, I’m beginning to see an odd new appreciation for IRL experiences. One that comes to mind happened earlier this month on the UK television show Britain’s Got Talent.
A group called Antigravity Show, hailing from Ukraine, walked onto the stage and masterfully simulated the sequence from Disney’s Tron, when Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is digitized and pulled into the video game. The man on stage then goes through a series of stunning video game challenges, with his own body as the main character. Fighting characters, collecting coins for points, and even racing vehicles. This was all done IRL with a screen, physical talent, visual ingenuity, and a team humans working together on a massive stage. By the end, the audience was stunned, as was I, even though I experienced it through a screen.
It was the kind of experience that has the most impact IRL, not on a screen, not through VR goggles, and not through characters generated by AI that you know don’t exist. I think, on some level, the pandemic of 2020-2021 was a test of how important, or not, screens and virtual entertainment are to people. We found out that remote and virtual can work, but by 2022, it was clear, we needed to see and experience each other in person to really live.
The IRL Economy
Another hint came my way via Disney’s earnings report [PDF] last month, and the subsequent appointment of Josh D’Amaro as CEO, taking over from Bob Iger, who will officially step down today. The earnings report showed roughly equal revenue for Disney’s theme parks ($10 billion) compared to its entertainment (film, TV, streaming) unit ($11.6 billion) for the last quarter. But that’s where the similarity ends. When it comes to profit, the money Disney gets to keep, its theme parks bested entertainment by $3.3 billion to $1.1 billion. Theme parks are where Disney is making most of its money. And that’s the IRL business, not the screens business.
Therefore it made sense that the company would appoint D’Amaro as its new CEO, given that he successfully shepherded the theme parks division through possibly the toughest years in the company’s history, starting in 2019, just before all theme parks shut down around the globe.
The lesson the major Hollywood studios learned from the pandemic was that having a streaming business is important, and can help ameliorate situations when IRL isn’t possible or desirable. But overall, the people-in-actual-seats business is still a winner. To that end, we’re beginning to see new activity in the IRL experiences business by an unlikely player: Netflix. Through its Netflix House locations, the streaming company is looking to inch its way into the IRL business that will, like Disney, allow it to leverage its popular TV show and movie characters in immersive environments. And now that Paramount Skydance is set to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery, studio chief David Ellison could be ready to ramp up his theme park plans to fully exploit the vast array of beloved film and TV IP he will soon control.
What does all this mean for AI in Hollywood? Well, part of that is up to the negotiations currently in play between SAG-AFTRA and the major studios. But directionally, what this all points to is that reports of the impending death of human acting in film and TV could be premature. For now, when we watch our screens, we still want to know that these live-action people exist and, barring that, we’d like to go out and experience an IRL simulation of what having an adventure in our favorite franchise might be like…at theme parks.
AI is coming. And it’s probably coming for animation first. As for humans? That’s less clear. But what is crystal clear is that IRL entertainment isn’t going anywhere. The future of IRL experiences, be they in a movie theater or a theme park, will mostly be about scale, not existence versus non-existence. With that in mind, if you’re a creator, inside or outside of Hollywood, start planning accordingly. Think a bit harder about what you can bring to an audience that gives them the IRL transcendence we’re all still looking for and that no AI avatar is close to (yet) successfully replicating.
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Cover image via Disney Parks/YouTube
