My Dog Is on Spotify. What That Says About AI Actors.
- joelfogelson
- Oct 3
- 2 min read
Fun fact: my dog is a music artist.
DJ Snowy Dog has a couple of ambient tracks on Spotify, credited as the artist. (Her true passion is chasing squirrels, not composing beats.)
The tracks were generated using AI as an experiment: could a persona drive recognition? The results? A handful of plays per month. The market spoke.
People didn’t care.
This isn’t a new idea. We’ve seen attempts before, from Max Headroom, a guy in a rubber mask with special effects, to Ananova, a computer-generated newsreader launched in 2000 and later retired, to Kubrick’s original vision for the film AI, where he imagined the main character as computer-generated, but Spielberg had to use a real boy.
Now the plot thickens.
A new AI actor, Tilly Norwood, has been unveiled by Particle 6 Productions. Tilly can “star” in movies and social media campaigns. Unsurprisingly, many in Hollywood are unsettled, just as writers, VFX artists, and musicians have already felt the squeeze from AI technologies.
Will this time be different?
Possibly. Younger audiences don’t look down on CGI-heavy characters in George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels. They often prefer them. Similarly, in music, most people don’t care if a catchy track comes from a human or a computer.
It’s the story that matters. Audiences care about whether the narrative or persona resonates, not whether the creator is organic or digital. We’ve seen this shift before when Disney moved from hand-drawn animation to computer animation.
The audience didn’t stop showing up.
The next frontier will likely be YouTube and TikTok. AI-generated personalities will emerge, with plenty of IP headaches, but again, the audience will decide.
Here’s the twist ending.
If human actors and creators want to stand out, the differentiator may be live engagement. Think Taylor Swift. Her cultural impact comes not just from media, but from experiences fans can share outside their homes. Live theater, conventions, or other in-person events may be the value proposition humans can offer that AI can’t replicate.
Because in the end, it’s not about what I or any of us think. It’s about what the market rewards.
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