Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg (born Caryn Elaine Johnson, 1955) is one of the few performers to have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. From her Oscar-winning turn in Ghost to Sister Act to nearly two decades moderating The View, she has been a fixture of American entertainment for forty years.

The Tilly Norwood pile-on

On the September 29, 2025 episode of The View, days after AI “actress” Tilly Norwood — created by Eline Van der Velden’s studio Xicoia — was reported to be attracting talent agents, Goldberg led the panel’s takedown. Her core charge was that the synthetic performer is a composite scraped from real ones: “It’s got Bette Davis’ attitude, it’s got Humphrey Bogart’s lips,” and, she added, her own humor — “a little bit of an unfair advantage” for something competing against the 5,000 actors it was distilled from.

She also warned viewers about what they would lose: “If you stick with this, with AI, you won’t have any connection to anything but your phone.” Yet her stance came with characteristic defiance rather than dread — she conceded the technology might look “seamless” within a few years, but declared “bring it on,” insisting audiences will always be able to tell the real thing: “We move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently.”

Goldberg’s intervention mattered because of where it happened: The View reaches millions of daytime viewers far outside the industry, and her segment — alongside reactions from Emily Blunt and SAG-AFTRA’s formal condemnation — helped turn Tilly Norwood from a trade-press story into a mainstream flashpoint.