The algo has now served me multiple pieces on the “AI” “actress” “Tilly Norwood” by the same outlet, Variety, which have mostly served to inform me of Variety’s institutional character. First it parroted the corpo hype about “Norwood” being “the next Scarlett Johansson,” only to pivot the next day when the majority of the movie industry made sour noises in response.

At time of writing, Variety is parroting the sour noises.

I don’t have strong feelings either way about the use of “AI” “actors” – the base tech has been around since at least Jurassic Park, and I have no love for either the automate-humanity-out-of-everything techbros or the movie-industry insiders who have helped to pervert copyright and lock off cultural symbols to the point where society arguably doesn’t have a shared culture any more – but I do have some at least moderate-strength feelings about the news and information industry, and this is… well, it’s definitely something.