From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters and this is The Business.

Last week, we brought you an AI-heavy conversation with SAG after president, Sean Aston.

This week, we dare to bring you Tilly Norwood creator, Eileen Vandervelden, who defends her much-reviled synthetic character.

Tilly has not taken anyone's job, first and foremost. That, that's what people were worried about. They were like, she's going to replace actors and film. Like, that was never our intention, and we never have done that. Like, she should be in the AI medium. We've said that from the start, therefore she's not meant to take real people's jobs. Now, I can't control what other people might be doing with AI, but I think that's really important. She's for the AI realm.

Vandervelden joined us in studio. This is before she dropped a Tilly Norwood music video this

past week, to state her case that Tilly Norwood is just another character and an extension

of herself, not so different from others that she's created during her years as an actress.

The Particle 6 Productions co-founder explains why she believes entertainment built with generative AI

will find a place in the industry and predicts that more agents will follow CAA's lead in signing synthetic characters.

But first we banter, stick around. It's the business from

KCRW. I am joined by my partner in banter, Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt. Hi there.

So, Ben Affleck, I have a distinct memory of seeing him on television a lot. I think around the

release of the rip, the movie he and

Matt Damon did for Netflix, through their company, artist's equity. And he was taking that

opportunity to talk about the dangers of AI. We have the sense of this existential dread. It's going

to wipe everything out. Right. I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies where they go, we're going to change everything.

In two years, there's going to be no more work.

Well, the reason they're saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the CAPEX spend they're going to make on these data centers with the argument that, like, as soon as we do the next model, it's going to scale up. It can be three times as good. So he's very articulate. He's very

smart. And then we find out that he's so smart that he secretly has been developing his own

AI company interpositive, which he also, like the RIP, sold to Netflix for a lot more money than the RIP because I think it was $600 million.

Well, let's be clear about that.

He has the opportunity to make up to $600 million on this deal, our friend Lucas reported.

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