Like thousands of actors, Tilly Norwood is looking for a Hollywood agent. Her greatest role? Pretending to be human.

That’s because Tilly Norwood is a 100% AI-generated product, created by Dutch producer and comedian Eline Van der Velden, founder of a company named Xicoia, which bills itself as the world’s first artificial intelligence talent studio. Velden pitches her AI creation as the next Scarlett Johansson, and says there are several agents vying to represent it, CBS News’ Jo Ling Kent reported recently.

Since Velden launched the digital character’s prospective career, Tilly Norwood has been all the talk in Hollywood.

But not in a good way. Guilds, actors and filmmakers have met the Xicoia product with an immediate wave of backlash, protesting that artificial intelligence should not have a starring role in the acting profession. In a statement Tuesday, the Screen Actors Guild said that “creativity is, and should remain, human-centered.”

“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” the guild said. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.”

Actor Sean Astin, who starred in “Lord of the Rings” and “The Goonies,” and was recently elected president of SAG-AFTRA, also emphasized how AI actors are artificial constructs trained off of work by real performers.

“You’re made up of stuff that doesn’t belong to you,” he told CBS News. “Let’s just make sure that credit is given where credit is due.”

Van der Velden, who is also the founder of the AI production studio Particle6, promoted Tilly Norwood last month at the Zurich Summit, the industry sidebar of the Zurich Film Festival. It was there that she said talent agencies were circling Norwood and that she expected to soon announce a signing.

Many in Hollywood hope that never happens.

“Any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds,” wrote Natasha Lyonne on Instagram. The “Russian Doll” star is directing a feature titled “Uncanny Valley” that pledges to use “ethical” artificial intelligence in combination with traditional filmmaking techniques. “Deeply misguided & totally disturbed,” she added. “Not the way. Not the vibe. Not the use.”

Artificial intelligence is often used as a tool in film production, though its implementation is hotly debated. It was a major bargaining point in the lengthy strike by SAG-AFTRA that concluded in late 2023 with some safeguards put in place to protect the use of actors’ likenesses and performances by AI. A yearlong strike by video game actors hinged on AI protections. In July, video game actors approved a new contract that mandates employers obtain written permission to create a digital replica.

But there have been numerous controversies over the use of AI in acting. The Oscar-winning 2024 film “The Brutalist” used artificial intelligence for Hungarian dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ characters, the revelation of which prompted debate in the industry.

Van der Velden responded to the stir around Tilly Norwood on Instagram.

“To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work — a piece of art,” Van der Velden said on Sunday. “Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.”

Van der Velden didn’t respond to interview requests Tuesday. In her post, she argued that AI characters should be judged as their own genre.

“Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftsmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance,” she added. “It takes time, skill and iteration to bring such a character to life.”

That statement was also shared on Tilly Norwood’s own Instagram account. Posts include photos of the creation drinking coffee, shopping for clothes and preparing for various projects. As of Tuesday, the account had more than 33,000 followers.

“Had such a blast filming some screen tests recently,” one post reads. “Every day feels like a step closer to the big screen.”

Asked what human actors bring to a performance that AI can’t, Astin said “authenticity,” adding, “You can fall in love. Your parents can die. You can you can be in some terrifying situation. The sum of all of our emotional experiences in our life, artificial intelligence can approximate it — it is not real.”

Dressed in a matching polka dot tank top and ruffled skirt with blue chunky heeled boots and a mini purse, Mattel’s newest Barbie may look like previous dolls at first glance.

But this particular doll stands out with a wearable insulin pump on her waist, a glucose monitor on her arm and a phone showing her blood sugar readings, making her the El Segundo-based toy company’s first Barbie with Type 1 diabetes.

The doll continues Mattel’s expansion of representation across its flagship brand. The Barbie Fashionistas line features more than 175 looks across various skin tones, body types and disabilities, including previous additions like a blind Barbie, a Barbie with Down syndrome and a Barbie with hearing aids.

The company’s commitment to representation has proved commercially successful. In 2024, the top 10 most popular Barbie Fashionista dolls globally included the blind Barbie and the Barbie with Down syndrome.

The Fashionistas series also includes dolls with vitiligo, prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs. The wheelchair-using doll has consistently been a top performer since its introduction in 2019.

Krista Berger, senior vice president of Barbie and global head of dolls at Mattel, said Barbie helps shape children’s early perceptions of the world. Reflecting medical conditions like T1D ensures “more kids can see themselves in the stories they imagine and the dolls they love.”

The doll was developed with Breakthrough T1D, the leading global Type 1 diabetes research and advocacy organization. The partnership ensured medical accuracy while incorporating diabetes awareness symbols through the clothes’ blue coloring and polka dot pattern.

Aaron J. Kowalski, chief executive of Breakthrough T1D, said the partnership is about “bringing greater visibility to a condition that affects so many families.”

The doll launched Tuesday during Breakthrough T1D’s 2025 Children’s Congress in Washington, D.C. The event brings together more than 170 children living with Type 1 diabetes, giving them face time with members of Congress to advocate for ongoing funding for Type 1 diabetes research. This year they asked members of Congress to renew funding for the Special Diabetes Program.

The Special Diabetes Program’s current funding expires after September. The program, first allocated by Congress in 1997, faces uncertainty amid recent cuts to federally-funded projects.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition affecting nearly 9 million people globally, with about 352,000 children living with diabetes in the United States. The CDC reports that 1.7 million individuals 20 or older live with Type 1 diabetes and use insulin.

The new Barbie is available through Mattel Shop and retailers nationwide.

Beverly Hills-based talent agency Gersh is acquiring Madrid-based sports representation firm You First in a major expansion that marks the firm’s entry into the highly competitive business of working with athletes.

The deal, announced Tuesday, doubles the agency’s staff to more than 600 people.

Additionally, the pact expands Gersh’s footprint to 22 offices in 14 countries. You First has more than 1,000 clients, including Spanish soccer player Fabián Ruiz and NBA player Jarrett Allen. Prior to the acquisition, Gersh did not represent athletes, but rather focused on actors, directors, writers and other talent.

“It felt essential for the agency to grow, change and evolve, and growth into the sports representation vertical was a central pillar and focus of where we felt we wanted to take the agency,” said managing partner Steve Gersh in an interview. “The area that we were where we felt there were the strongest tailwinds and biggest opportunity for growth, not only domestically but globally, was in sports and sports representation.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

You First Chief Executive Juan Aísa said the Gersh partnership allows his business to offer “greater support for clients.” Aísa will join Gersh’s board and continue to run You First, while Steve Gersh will lead Gersh Sports, the agency said.

“Together, we’re building an ecosystem that goes beyond sports and entertainment representation to foster innovation and create new opportunities for global expansion,” Aísa said in a statement.

The deal comes after many agencies and management firms were impacted by last year’s dual Hollywood strikes. Those same companies are adapting to an entertainment industry in which athletes, actors and other celebrities are embarking on various business endeavors, which span social media videos, sports, music, TV and film.

Agencies, including WME owner Endeavor and Creative Artists Agency, evolved by growing and diversifying.

Gersh said that his agency is profitable and is looking at other potential acquisition opportunities.

“This is the start of the journey, not the end,” Gersh said.

Last year, the Gersh agency took on an investment from private equity firm Crestview Partners in an effort to grow the representation business. Crestview has a 45% ownership stake in Gersh, which was founded in 1949.

The You First acquisition is the second purchase in Gersh’s recent expansion. In January, the agency bought A3 Artists Agency’s digital and alternative content departments.

In addition to representing athletes, influencers and other talent, You First works with sports leagues and major brands such as Formula 1 and Starbucks on marketing campaigns.

This November, Santa Ana voters will get to decide whether to make our elections fairer by giving its noncitizen neighbors voting rights in the city’s elections. If Santa Ana’s Measure DD passes, immigrants like me who live, raise families, work, and pay taxes in Santa Ana would have a say in who represents us at City Hall.

I was only 14 years old when I first arrived in the United States. My mother was already living in Santa Ana when I joined her. We hadn’t seen each other since I was 4. Starting a new life in California as a teenager was a major shift and a learning experience for me as I got to know my new neighbors.

I attended Los Amigos High School, where I was initially placed in an English language class. Half of the class was Mexican, the other half Vietnamese. I grew to appreciate our cultural diversity and became more involved in school and in the community. I joined a club to promote college readiness. I played volleyball. I got involved at a local community center. Over time, I was proud to call myself a part of the Santa Ana community.

Santa Ana has been my home for many years. I work and pay taxes. I’ve been involved in civic engagement and youth mentorship programs. I lead a nonprofit organization as its executive director. I recently got married, and my wife and I are building our life together in Santa Ana.

Despite my deep commitment to the Santa Ana community, I don’t have a say in who represents me at City Hall simply because I do not have U.S. citizenship. I have been told that my needs do not matter to elected officials, because I cannot vote. The political exclusion of Santa Ana residents like me, who make up a quarter of the city’s population, is unfair and undemocratic.

Our country was founded on the principle of no taxation without representation, or in other words, no decisions about us, without us. Those who contribute to the community deserve a voice in electoral politics. I’m one of the many Santa Ana noncitizen residents who pay a combined total of over $117 million in state and local taxes annually. If Santa Ana was truly a democratic city that aspires to live up to its American ideals, noncitizens would be included in the political process and given the right to cast a ballot in local elections.

MIAMI, Okla. — Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes grew up playing video games, including “probably hundreds of hours” colonizing a distant planet in the 1999 title Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

So when that same game studio, Firaxis, approached the tribal nation a quarter-century later with a proposal to make a playable character out of their famous leader Tecumseh in the upcoming game Civilization 7, Barnes felt a rush of excitement.

“I was like, ‘This can’t be true,’” Barnes said. “Do they want us to participate in the next version of Civilization?”

Beloved by tens of millions of gamers since its 1991 debut, Meier’s Civilization series sparked a new genre of empire-building games that simulated the real world while also diverging into imaginary twists. It has captivated nerdy fans like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a young Barnes with its intricate and addictive gameplay and rich historical context.

Choosing among leaders that can range from Cleopatra to Mahatma Gandhi, players build a civilization from its first settlement to a sprawling network of cities, negotiate with or conquer neighbors, and develop trade, science, religion and the arts. Circana, which tracks U.S. game sales, says it’s the bestselling strategy video game franchise of all time.

But things have changed since the early days of Civilization. Of course, video game technology has advanced, but so too has society’s understanding of cultural appropriation and the importance of accurate historical framing.

Firaxis dropped plans to add a historical Pueblo leader in 2010 after tribal leaders objected. The game incorporated a Cree leader in 2018 but faced public criticism in Canada after its release.

Developers knew that to properly represent the Shawnee leader, they would need the input and blessing of the Shawnee people.

For Barnes, it was an opportunity to not only showcase the power and might of the Shawnee but also a way for tribal citizens to see themselves represented in popular culture in a new, imagined future for the tribe.

“For us, it’s really about a cultural expression of cultural hegemony,” Barnes said. “Why not us? Why not? Of course we should be in a video game title. Of course we should see ourselves reflected in every media. So we took advantage of the opportunity to make our star shine.”

For designers at Firaxis, the partnership represented a chance to improve a game development system that has been criticized by Indigenous leaders for misrepresenting their cultures, and for the Shawnee, it was a way to promote their language and history in a new way.

In interviews with The Associated Press, series founder Meier and other studio executives acknowledged past missteps in the Civilization franchise’s casual treatment of history, including how it incorporated Indigenous groups and colonization more broadly.

That led to careful thought and months of collaboration to “make sure it’s an authentic, sincere recreation” of Shawnee culture, said game producer Andrew Frederiksen, speaking on a September visit to the tribe’s headquarters. That meant asking the Shawnee questions about what a Shawnee university or library building of the future would look like and creating new Shawnee words to describe futuristic concepts.

Meier, who started developing computer games in the 1980s, said the Shawnee partnership is “kind of special” and was borne out of meetings with Barnes where the chief talked about the challenges of preserving the Shawnee language. As part of the partnership, Firaxis and its publishing label 2K Games — subsidiary of gaming giant Take-Two Interactive — are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars in language revitalization programs and facilities.

When Shawnee actor Dean Dillon auditioned for a part that involved speaking the Shawnee language, he didn’t know he’d be voicing Tecumseh. The military and political leader from what is currently Ohio united a confederation of Native American tribes to resist U.S. westward expansion in the early 19th century.

“I just gave it my best shot,” Dillon said. “And then a few weeks later, I heard back and they said, ‘We’d like to offer you the role of Tecumseh.’ And my head exploded and I ran around the house yelling, ‘My gosh! My gosh!’”

“It was surreal, to say the least, to see Tecumseh’s face but to hear my voice come out of that,” Dillon said.

While the franchise has always had Indigenous leaders, starting with Montezuma of the Aztecs in the original 1991 game, Meier said game developers at the time were looking for familiar figures without much thought into the weight of history. Playable characters in that game included Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, whose totalitarian regimes were still in many people’s memory.

“We never realized people would take it as seriously as they do,” Meier said. “We always kind of felt, ‘Here’s a way that you can change history.’ Maybe we can make Stalin a good guy. But that might have been stretching things a little too far.”

“We learned a lot as time went on,” he added. The seventh edition, due out in February, will for the first time do away with barbarians — or at least no longer use that term for hostile characters that are not part of a playable civilization. Players can instead create diplomatic relations with them.

And as the game’s audience expanded beyond the U.S. and Europe, with more than 70 million games sold worldwide, so too did players want their societies or heritage reflected. More recent editions include themed music and spoken languages from dozens of playable civilizations, from the Māori people of New Zealand to the Mapuche of South America.

“It is now a badge of honor for a nation to be included in Civilization,” Meier said. “We’ve been lobbied by different countries, et cetera.”

That’s not to say everyone has been happy about their inclusion in a game centered around settling land and exploiting resources. Civilization is one of the pioneers of the genre known as 4X — for “explore, expand, exploit and exterminate.”

After the franchise added a 19th-century Cree leader to its gameplay in 2018, a prominent Cree leader complained to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that it “perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land. That is totally not in concert with our traditional ways and worldview.”

One of the game’s two resident historians, Andrew Johnson, said the studio wanted to make Tecumseh a playable leader, but after reaching out to some academics, “we were told repeatedly, ‘No, this is a really bad idea, and nobody’s going to sign off on this.’”

So Johnson suggested reaching out to Shawnee leaders directly to ask what they think, and how it could help them.

“I think so often you get people assuming that representation in Civ is a reward of some sort. It’s not,” said Johnson, who’s also an anthropologist who studies Southeast Asia. “This is a company and we’re selling a product and we’re using an image and likeness to make a profit. And getting your ‘civ’ in Civilization doesn’t really help you very much if you’re struggling to preserve your culture.”

The game studio and the tribal nation decided on a partnership that would help the Shawnee people preserve and expand some of that culture, particularly language. Chief Barnes said the tribe was in dire need of resources for language education, and creating dialogue for a Shawnee civilization of the future was another way to help revitalize their language.

“Firaxis was asking questions about language we never would have thought to ask,” Barnes said in September at the opening of a new language education center in northeastern Oklahoma.

Barnes hasn’t had a chance to play the new version of the game yet, but he is already imaging the future he can build virtually, as well as how doing so will inspire other Shawnee gamers. “What I do know is that with the efforts we’re making here today, I expect Shawnee to be spoken in 2500.”

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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.