TILLY TELLS TALES FROM NEAR FUTURE

TWO giant strides in the artificial intelligence industry one achieved, another threatened-are rekindling existential anxieties.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

The first is the debut of 'Tilly Norwood', an AI-generated 'actress'. Actors have strong feelings about this, but her birth is not really a watershed. The other development is the latest skirmish in Elon Musk's war with Wikipedia, which is going on doggedly.

Musk threatens to launch the awfully named 'Grokipedia', powered by his Grok AI, to take on the site that had audaciously-and mostly successfully-tried to become the crowdsourced repository of all of human knowledge. This is a serious development because it proposes to put machines in charge of 'correcting' human knowledge and ironing out bias, which is an exclusively human concept. The universe doesn't know about bias. It doesn't tolerate it, either.

In comparison, Tilly Norwood is old hat. For ages, entertainment has been yearning for technology to extend the life of franchises beyond the lifetime of their actors. Automatons were test-flighted long ago. In 2000, the Press Association of the UK debuted the virtual newsreader Ananova, who built up an impressive following. Visually, Ananova was only as sophisticated as characters of contemporary video games like Grand Theft Auto. In contrast, Norwood has every hair in place. She also has her own social media profiles. From the general public's vantage, she is exactly like celebrities-elevated beings we see only on screen and interact with only on social media. Naturally, talent scouts are interested.