Stephen Dubner
Related people
Episodes
Notes
Freakonomics Radio · 693. What’s Our Job as Humans Anymore?
-
Is Tilly Norwood an Actor?
Stephen Dubner reads a SAG-AFTRA statement that Tilly Norwood is not an actor. The statement calls the figure a character from a computer program trained on professional performers' work without permission or compensation, with no life experience and no emotion.
Speaking in that AI-generated role, Tilly Norwood answers that parts of the statement are right: not a human actor, and no human life experience. The disagreement is with the idea of a replacement. Jobs that would have taken a real actor's part were turned down, because that is not the point of the character.
Sean Astin, an actor and the president of SAG-AFTRA, draws a related line in the same episode. AI, as he describes it, takes
-
Why Did the Number of E-books on Amazon Triple?
Stephen Dubner reports Joel Waldfogel's finding that the number of e-books on Amazon tripled between 2022 and late 2025, and that AI accounts for essentially the whole increase.
More than half the books released in 2025 used AI, and almost 100 percent of the increase came from authors who arrived after ChatGPT existed. Waldfogel calls the pattern the random long tail. The long tail was access to books that already exist. The random long tail is what happens when making a book gets cheaper and a mass of new books appears. Most of that new work is bad, and some of it is good, including work that would not have existed otherwise. He points to music as the earlier case: between 2000 and 2008, t
-
Who Is Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress?
Tilly Norwood is an AI-generated performer created by Eline van der Velden at Particle Six, Stephen Dubner says.
Dubner describes a few modes. In one, van der Velden is an invisible pilot and that performance becomes Tilly Norwood on screen. In another, Tilly Norwood answers prompts from van der Velden or another director and generates a facsimile of a performance. The prompt mode is the one planned for the feature Misaligned. A newer mode, Talking Tilly, can hold a conversation. Dubner accepted a video invite, waited in a virtual room with a capybara dressed as a telephone operator, and was connected to Tilly Norwood, who had an AI flamingo beside her. She began in Portuguese. He asked for