It's not acting if it's just one AI avatar talking at another

Contrast the hype for a new AI 'performer' with the authentic reaction to a premiere from Daniel Day-Lewis

- LESLIE VOORIS GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

THE THEATER HELD a palpable charge the night “Anemone” premiered late last month at the New York Film Festival. When the credits ended, the audience sat seemingly in stunned silence.

Then a spotlight swept toward the balcony, and there stood the film's star, Daniel Day-Lewis, alongside his wife, filmmaker Rebecca Miller, and their son Ronan Day-Lewis — director of “Anemone.” The crowd erupted — elated to witness one of the greatest actors of our time step out of retirement to embody a role in his son's directorial debut. That moment carried a reminder of what cinema truly is: the human presence of artists who risk themselves before us.

That same week brought a very different kind of unveiling. Particle6, a U.K.-based company, introduced Tilly Norwood, the world’s first AI “actor,” which has already garnered interest from talent agencies. Tilly is not a person, not a performer, not even a flawed human being struggling toward art. It is a coded composite, a computerized ideal of cinematic beauty. It can be programmed to pout and cry but never to feel.

The contrast could not be clearer. On one side is Day-Lewis, embodying a role that carries the weight of decades of human experience and on the other is a simulation designed to approximate star power without ever touching the messy, unrepeatable humanity that gives cinema its soul.