The ‘perfect woman’? Why the creation of AI actress Tilly Norwood should make both women and men worry

When I first saw Tilly Norwood, I reacted viscerally. Something about her was very, very off.

She was stunning. Slim, petite, great hair, a beautiful smile, captivating eyes, and light, flawless skin – I couldn’t help but stare.

The thing is, she’s not even human. She – or it? – is artificial intelligence (AI). And, like many uncanny AI creations developing faster than we can keep up, she looks very real, very human.

Had I not known she was just a tangle of data, I might have believed her creator British video production studio Particle6’s claim that she’s “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman” – yet another attractive young actress to join Hollywood’s endless ranks of beautiful actresses.

So what makes her so disturbing?

Well, there’s the obvious: She’s a robot.

She’s what Particle6 chief executive officer Eline Van Der Velden describes on LinkedIn as “a creative work – a piece of art”.

And, just as AI polishes everything it touches – from the way we speak online to the way we write our emails, and the way we parent our kids – Norwood is a polished sum of thousands of performers. 

But much has already been said about the absurdity of treating her as a “real actress”. The American labour union Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) wasted no time in condemning Norwood’s existence.

In a statement on social media, the union opposed “the replacement of human performers by synthetics”, and asserted that Norwood “is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers”.

Plus, while Van Der Velden boasted that “several talent agencies were interested” in Norwood, no actual agency was named.

Several actors – real, human – also chimed in. Actress Emily Blunt called Norwood “really, really scary” on a podcast by American entertainment magazine Variety. And Whoopi Goldberg, on an episode of the talk show The View, pointed out that Norwood will never replace human performers as “we move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently”.

The danger of Norwood, however, isn’t in her potential to replace human performers – it’s in what she represents to women and men.

She isn’t just any AI project, she’s an AI actress, a female public figure designed in a way that completely strips her of agency. 

This isn’t just an element of AI dystopia, it’s the old fantasy of the “perfect, subservient woman” taken to its most extreme conclusion yet.

Norwood is marketed as flawless yet entirely obedient. She’s good-looking, funny, and compliant – capable of crying, screaming, or laughing on command.

Unlike any real actress, she has no history, no emotional baggage, no capacity whatsoever to say no or resist – unless you programme or prompt her to. And that’s the most disturbing part.

Norwood is the embodiment of the male gaze, a concept coined by British film theorist Laura Mulvey that asserts how women are often shown through a man’s perspective – as objects of desire, control and even fetishes, rather than people with their own stories.

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the fully AI-generated promotional video for Norwood’s debut sums this up perfectly. A man, alone in his bedroom, watches her on his multiple computer screens and excitedly says, “Wow, she’ll do anything I say – I’m already in love.”

NORWOOD AS ‘THE PERFECT WOMAN’

The “perfect woman” trope doesn’t just refer to a woman who looks beautiful and young. Her most striking traits are her silence and obedience. Her existence revolves around serving and pleasing men.

This idea isn’t new. One of its earliest literal manifestations appeared in the 1949 British comedy film, The Perfect Woman (yes, that is the title).

The story follows two men escorting a robot, played by English actress Patricia Roc. The robot was created by a professor who modelled her after his niece and designed her to be obedient and silent as his ideal assistant, responding only when she is told.

In the almost 80 years that have passed since the film’s debut, the lines between fiction and reality have blurred.

For decades, people have come up with innovative ways to turn women into objects of desire and control. From love dolls – lifeless, plastic bodies made to serve sexually and never speak – to animated avatars and role-playing game characters with exaggerated, hyper-feminine features designed to please men.

Each version of that “perfect woman” became a little more responsive, more interactive, more believable – but her core trait of subservience remained. 

Now, Norwood has arrived, and look where we are – still creating objects that look like women, whose primary function is subservience. Norwood is simply the latest upgrade of that same “perfect woman” fantasy.

WHY NORWOOD’S EXISTENCE AS AN ‘ACTRESS’ IS WORRYING

So, we’ve established Norwood as the embodiment of the “perfect woman”. Aside from the dehumanising nature of the trope, how else is this bad for real women and men?

The problem doesn’t just lie in her representation of the “perfect woman”; it also lies in her role as a so-called “actress”.

Norwood doesn’t just mirror the “perfect woman” fantasy; she normalises it. The idea of a controllable “perfect woman” is now mainstream, packaged as technological innovation.

Economist Tyler Cowen, writing for the right-leaning media company The Free Press, inadvertently revealed the core of the issue when he gushed over Tilly Norwood’s lack of humanity, citing it as the reason she's his “favourite actress”.

In his disturbingly admiring words: “Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That’s because she’s AI.”

Norwood is desirable because she isn’t real. She’s an actress who can’t refuse, can’t age, can’t argue, can’t make a misstep. She is a fantasy made manifest, the ultimate male-gaze projection.

And if AI is built to serve its users – like ChatGPT or Copilot – then it’s not hard to imagine a near future where there are multiple Norwoods, “available” for hire. Each one an actress, a companion, a lover, a helper, a superheroine, a dragon-slaying, cry-when-you-tell-her-to stunt performer – depending on what you prompt her to be.

Her existence warps expectations surrounding women, encouraging the idea that women exist to please and that experiences like intimacy and love can be simulated.

It’s a slippery slope, for both men and women, between seeing these figures for entertainment and dehumanising women as mere objects of desire.

Even if Particle6 argues that Norwood can be programmed to be independent or even subvert the male gaze, her very existence undermines that. She remains a subservient tool – a digital embodiment of the same decades-old trope that women shouldn’t think or resist, only serve.

Humans aren’t templates. We are complex, contradictory, difficult, and real. The beauty of a healthy relationship comes from working through those contradictions, from growing and figuring things out together. The beauty of an actress is in her history and her real, lived experiences.

AI IS HERE TO STAY, BUT HUMANITY ENDURES

AI isn’t going anywhere. It’s here, and as I’m typing this (very old-school, I know), hundreds of thousands of AI-generated videos are made every day using software like ChatGPT, Copilot, and now Sora 2, a free video generator that promises to “easily transform text to video” (shudders).

It looks bleak. Some days, I genuinely want to pack up and live in the middle of nowhere, far from all these devices that make life feel like a never-ending season of Black Mirror.

But I still choose to be optimistic.

Like every major invention before it, AI comes with its own kind of moral panic, and rightly so. Yet history has shown that panic is often just the first stage of understanding. To keep our need for real connection intact, humans learn, adapt, and ask harder questions.

Not all technology is art, and even when it is, art never exists in a vacuum.

Every creation carries the emotional, political, and cultural baggage of the world that made it. If we’re going to build an actress, we have to recognise that she comes with centuries of ideas about women, and thus it’s worth asking: What does she look like? Who does she serve? Who gets to control her?

Perhaps Particle6 and their CEO did ask those questions. But they missed the mark in the way they presented Norwood. And, judging by their now-disabled social media comments, they don’t seem particularly open to hearing the rest of the conversation.

These questions matter, not just for artistes, but for audiences, and for anyone choosing whether to consume or resist the AI slop that’s filling our screens and shaping our desires.

We don’t have to abandon and always be critical of technology; we just have to keep asking what it’s doing to us.