Everyone is aware of the extremely fast advances in AI technology, but have those advancements gone too far? The music industry is being threatened by the introduction of AI music-making machines that can produce music nearly indistinguishable from that of a real person. On top of that, Tilly Norwood, an AI actress, serves as an example of how close we are to no longer recognizing AI and having it become completely intermixed within the film industry.
In recent years, Spotify and other streaming services have become overrun with AI-generated music, especially in the “lo-fi” and “study” genres. Because this kind of music is generally not very complex, it is easy for AI to make a passable song based on its data. These tracks are frequently designed to exploit streaming royalty rules, such as how Spotify pays a small royalty once a track passes a 30-second play threshold. So people just spam Spotify with AI-generated content to get what is essentially free money.
Spotify itself admitted in September 2025 that it had removed 75 million AI “spam” tracks over the past year, according to MusicRadar.com, a shocking number given that its entire catalogue of songs is in the hundreds of millions!
One infamous case of AI artists suddenly rising in popularity, having no background, involves The Velvet Sundown, a band that soared to over one million monthly streams on Spotify until closer inspection revealed that the whole band was a complete facade. Established artists have been affected too. The rock group, Holding Absence, publicly complained when an AI “band” trained on their style and eventually gained more monthly listeners than them! The whole situation calls into question the idea of intellectual property and how we will legally deal with cases of intellectual property theft by AI.
While some question whether or not Spotify is creating these fake artists themselves, the company pushed back. However, the damage for many has already been dealt. I know I have felt it because one of my favorite artists, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, has fully left Spotify over the situation.
If AI is destabilizing the music world, AI “actress” Tilly Norwood is pushing the boundaries for video and arguably threatening to flood the film ecosystem with hyperrealistic AI content. For some background, Tilly Norwood is a fully AI-generated character marketed as an “actress,” created in 2025 by Xicoia, an “AI talent studio.” She is marketed as a young woman who lives in London who enjoys shopping and iced coffee. I know this sounds crazy, and like we are quickly becoming a dystopia. But there are two sides to this story that are important to hear.
On one side, criticism of Tilly Norwood comes from the rather obvious fact that Tilly is not an actor. She has no life experience, no emotion, and her “performance” is built upon the work of countless human actors that she has been trained on (many of whose work may have been used without consent or compensation).
On the other side, defenders of Tilly say that she is a fun experiment. They say she is a new tool rather than a replacement for real actors. They also argue that AI actors offer practical advantages such as lowered production costs, flexibility, and the possibility of exploring roles or stories that the human industry may shy away from.
It truly is insane just how rapidly AI is evolving, and it is pretty safe to say that AI has officially gotten to the point where it could potentially displace jobs and hurt industries built on human creativity.