21st CENTURY HEADLINES: ‘Hollywood is desperate to hire my AI actress.’

If her supporters are to be believed, actress Tilly Norwood is on the verge of Hollywood superstardom. The London-based girl-next-door starlet, they say, is preparing to sign with a major talent agency.

But Tilly is not a success story from the UK theatre schools or a feel-good tale of a working-class actor with a latent skill for acting, like Owen Cooper, 15, who starred in hit Netflix drama Adolescence and became the youngest male actor to win an Emmy.

Instead, she is manufactured by artificial intelligence, and so is completely fake. She, or it, is poised to be the first AI actress to be signed by a real-life talent agency that normally works with humans, according to Tilly’s creator.

Whether that ambition comes true or not, Tilly’s creation is a sign of the challenge for the film industry as it grapples with whether AI talent can replace much more expensive real-life stars.

To paraphrase Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, she’s not real, but you can’t have everything.

In any case, digital thespians have come a long way since 2015’s Star Wars: Rogue One.