Global showbiz battle with AI heats up

The clash between creativity and artificial intelligence is escalating across the entertainment world, as performers in Hollywood and Bollywood push back against the use of synthetic images and voices they say threaten their craft, reputations and livelihoods.

In Los Angeles, the debut of an AI-generated "actress" named Tilly Norwood at a Zurich film industry conference has drawn swift condemnation from the SAG-AFTRA performers' union.

Representing 160,000 actors, announcers and recording artists, the union denounced attempts to replace human performers with "synthetics," insisting that "creativity is, and should remain, human-centred."

Tilly Norwood, a photorealistic, twenty-something character with a British accent, was created by London-based Particle6. Producer Eline Van der Velden described her as a work of art sparking conversation, but also suggested ambitions to make the character "the next Scarlett Johansson."

That prospect unsettled union leaders, who stressed that Tilly is no actor but a computer-generated product trained on the work of countless professionals - without permission or compensation.

The reaction reflects deeper anxieties that fuelled last year's strikes by actors and writers in the United States. While Hollywood has long embraced digital effects, the idea of synthetic performers gaining traction with talent agents has sharpened concerns.

"Scarlett Johansson has a fan base. Scarlett Johansson is a person," said Yves Berquist of the University of Southern California, dismissing the hype around fully artificial stars.

Thousands of miles away, India's film industry is facing a parallel challenge. Bollywood couple Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan have gone to the Delhi High Court seeking curbs on AI-generated YouTube videos that use their likeness without consent.

Their lawsuits, spanning 1,500 pages, demand takedowns of manipulated clips — including sexually explicit deepfakes — and call for Google to ensure such content is not used to train other AI platforms.

The Bachchans argue that YouTube's policies risk multiplying infringements, as videos uploaded by users could feed rival AI models. They are seeking $450,000 in damages and a permanent injunction, while already winning interim orders to remove more than 500 links deemed harmful to their dignity and goodwill.

India is YouTube's largest market, with 600 million users, and AI-generated "Bollywood love stories" have already attracted millions of views. For lawyers and actors alike, the concern is the same as in Hollywood: once synthetic portrayals take hold online, their spread may be impossible to contain.