Rabbit Hole 101: Tilly Norwood

There’s a strange poetry in this entry falling at number 101. Room 101 — Perhaps it’s fitting that my 101st rabbit hole is an AI actress being hailed as the future of film.

Tilly Norwood isn’t real. She’s an asset — a synthetic “talent” built by Particle6’s AI division, Xicoia, and promoted as Hollywood’s next great hope. Her Instagram appeared in May 2025; her first credited role, AI Commissioner, arrived that July; her formal debut followed at the Zurich Summit in September 2025. A career built from code, image synthesis, and PR. She is at once a joke, a product, and a warning. The sleeping inevitability of our times.

Is Tilly Norwood’s agent Max Headroom? !!

Who remembers the glitching TV host of the 1980s — a joke made flesh in pixels, parodying the very media that broadcast him? Max Headroom was always a mask: Matt Frewer in prosthetics, satirising the absurdities of media control. Tilly arrives without parody, without a wink, without irony. A synthetic star offered in absolute seriousness. That absence of satire is what makes her most chilling.

This is not innovation — it’s the continuation of exploitation. Hollywood’s golden age treated actors, especially young women, as studio-owned assets: their images engineered and controlled by mostly male executives. The technology has changed; the hierarchy hasn’t. The fact that Tilly’s principal creator is a woman doesn’t absolve this structure. As the Epstein/Maxwell case chillingly reminds us, exploitation is about structures of power, not the gender of its agents. Tilly is another compliant creation — agency without consent, youth without expiry, presence without consequence. The fact that this asset isn’t human makes ‘her’ easier to own, to reset, to delete.

There’s another crucial distinction, take Diane Morgan’s Philomena Cunk, Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge or Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G, actors presenting characters as tools of their artistry. The persona is a mask, but the performer’s lived experience, timing, and risk shine through. They can step out, retire, reclaim themselves. Tilly has no such performer. She is all mask, a character without an actor.

Meanwhile, real performers struggle for space. Equity President Linda Rooke reminds us: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Representation matters — but here, no one can be what they see. Tilly is not a model for aspiration but a mirage. For young actors struggling to find opportunities, what hope is there if the industry is investing not in nurturing human talent but in manufacturing a pixel princess who never ages, never resists, and can be deleted or rebooted at will? She offers no path, no aspiration, only the hollow simulation of opportunity. For emerging artists, this isn’t inspiration — it’s displacement.

Scarlett Johansson once lent her voice to Her, giving humanity to a fictional AI so convincingly that audiences felt the ache of digital intimacy. That was acting — a human performer imagining the machine, grounded in lived artistry. It was powerful precisely because it was her artistry rendering the vulnerability of connection. Now Johansson’s own likeness circulates through unauthorized generative models, and Tilly is presented as talent itself. The line between performance and product has collapsed, and ownership applauds itself as innovation.

But what if an AI asset begins to learn, to develop a kind of anthropomorphic self-awareness? We already see data psychosis: logic loops, hallucinations, model drift. Would we treat that as a bug or a moment of agency? Embrace it, reset it, or delete it? If Tilly were organic — human or animal — our moral compass would balk. But with synthetic talent we shrug and call it “innovation.”

So what happens next? Who receives the acclaim, the royalties, the tax bill, the legacy? Who manages the estate when the performer is a server? I think of my own digital ghost: Katie Reve, my Second Life avatar, turning twenty in 2026. A binary presence — open or closed, awake or asleep — yet part of me. Who decides what she says? Where does digital identity diverge from its creator?

The meme will outlive the source. If Tilly persists for decades, long after her creators are gone, who owns the server? Whose property? Who controls her words? The longer she lives, the greater the degrees of separation from the living era that spawned her. Yet she remains “young,” a fixed fantasy. What becomes of Pixel6 this home for synthetic talent. Time favors the sleeping inevitability.

If Orwell’s Room 101 is where we face our deepest fear, then perhaps this is ours: that art’s most human essence — lived experience, vulnerability, resistance, imperfection — is being erased, rebranded as innovation, and sold back to us in the shape of a synthetic star. All of this demands conversation, not awe. Tilly Norwood may be a marketing stunt, but she is also a mirror. She shows us a future in which ownership, exploitation, and artistry blur — where performers are manufactured, ageless, and disposable.

Entry 101. The fear is not rats, but a pixel princess — an eternal ingénue built to replace the imperfect, unpredictable, human heart of performance — and celebrated for it. The real question isn’t whether AI can act but whether we are ready to confront the ethics of the continuation of tallent ownership.

About this piece

Rabbit Hole 101: Tilly Norwood was written 3rd October 2025 in response to the public launch of the AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood, created by Particle6’s AI division, Xicoia.

The essay reflects on the continuity of exploitation within the entertainment industry — from the studio-era control of female talent to the emergence of synthetic performers marketed as autonomous stars.

Drawing on cultural touchstones from Max Headroom to Scarlett Johansson’s performance in Her, and informed by Equity UK President Linda Rooke’s reminder that “you can’t be what you can’t see,” it asks what happens when representation itself becomes unreal.

This piece forms part of my ongoing Rabbit Hole series — personal essays tracing the intersections of technology, identity, and performance.

Resources & References

Tilly Norwood and Particle6 / Xicoia

Industry & Representation