Name: The Artist and the Algorithm
Uploaded: 2025-12-09
Duration: 20 min 12 s

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has suggested that Hollywood may be the canary in the coal mine for the disruption AI is bringing across industries. The entrepreneur behind the Emmy-winning creative collaboration platform HITRECORD has become one of the leading voices calling for fair compensation when human creativity is used to train machine intelligence. As he directs a new AI-focused thriller for Netflix, Gordon-Levitt reflects on how generative technology is reshaping art, authorship, and the meaning of originality.

The Artist and the Algorithm

Conferences

Thank you for being here. All right, good morning everybody. I know, right? Can you feel the caffeine flowing? Um, so you were giving an interview last month, um, and you said, I love new technology. Are you a tech optimist, tech pessimist, a tech skeptic? Well, I, I do hold quite a lot of optimism for AI. I think it could be so great in so many ways, uh, but I also think there are probably potential pitfalls, and we're running right towards them in many ways. And, and I think that if we let this technology unfold driven purely by business incentives and there's no guard rails that are put there for the public good, we could see some really dark outcomes. That's what we've seen with a lot of tech over the last 20 years. We've seen it with social media, which was so good in so many ways and like it'd be hard for you to find someone who is more positive and optimistic about social media than me. I did this online community for creativity and using social media tech called Hit Record. But obviously we've also seen all these sort of damaging side effects and maybe we could have avoided some of those with some proper guard rails and let's hope we don't make those same mistakes again. Yeah, indeed, so you have been quite out there about these guard rails, this need for policy change. I mean, there's there's a whole litany of things that we can do to solve for this, and hopefully, hopefully we'll talk about it today. Um, you signed a petition for safer super intelligence as we're calling it now. Um, you've been rather well, supportive of one and more critical of another AI bills here in the state of California, um, and you have definitely been critical of the chatbots by Meta and other companies that have merged into, um, shall we say, erotic content. Yes, for kids, for erotic content for eight year olds. Are you in favor of erotic content for 8 year olds? Yeah, exactly, because that is what the chief ethicist of Meta approved. In their AI companions on their platforms, so you know we're in a moment right now where it feels like all of the wins from the White House, from the states, from certainly from the tech companies, everybody's just trying to, well, it's framed in a sort of global competitive way, right? It's it's, it's no one's saying well we're To make more money. It's more just like we have to get there first, but of course all of the concerns that you're, you know, you have are being kind of pushed to the side in that. So what do we need to do? We should talk head on about that key argument that they make like, oh we have to get there first. We have to, I mean, it turns very quickly into this geopolitical thing, correct? We have to beat China. That's right. OK, so what, what do we do about that because clearly, uh. That's where the winds are blowing. So this is a uh. A very powerful stroke of what I would call storytelling. This is what I've, you know, I'm a spent my life working on is storytelling, and there's, you got to unpack the layers of the story when they say we got to beat China. The implicit and actually sometimes explicit comparison there is to the race to nuclear weapons during World War II. Indeed there was this moment in history where the US mounted the Manhattan. And the US was racing against the Nazis to take Einstein's theory and build a bomb within it. Whoever would get there first and push that button was going to win the war and kind of decide whether the world was going to become fascist or liberal, not liberal in today's sense. And that story is told today. As if the same thing is gonna happen, as if there's this thing they, they use terms like super intelligence, you just said they also use a term called AGI. There are no definitions for these terms. You can ask the most informed engineer or policy person in AI, and I have, and they're like, yeah, there's, there's not really a definition for this. Because it's all a story, it's hand waving. It's a sleight of hand. There is not going to be a moment where they push a button and all of a sudden win the war and decide that America is going to dominate instead of China. That's actually not coming. But if you try to say, hey, maybe we need to put some guard rails in place, maybe instead of just accelerating towards your maximum profits, we need to steer and we can still go fast, but let's build stuff that's going to also be good for everybody, not just for profits. The first thing they say is, yeah, but then we'll lose to China. Yeah, but it's, it's sort of a paper thin story that doesn't really make sense. Do you, this is an unfair question, but do you feel that Artificial intelligence as it is. Framed today is more dangerous or less dangerous than nuclear weapons in the in the middle of the century. Oh, obviously the dangers are very different, but yeah, look. I, I've spent the last because you mentioned I'm about to direct a movie about this stuff and so I've spent the last several years talking to all kinds of experts and, uh, you know, engineers and policy people and people who work in the big tech companies and people who work in academia and everyone in between governments. And there's no agreement on this, so I, I don't know. I don't know the answer. There definitely are a lot of people, a lot of experts. There's, there's like a survey that I think half of published AI researchers give it a 1 in 10 chance that like something extremely catastrophic happens with AI along the lines of, you know, nuclear warfare or whatever. I, I don't know. I certainly don't know, but if these experts are giving it a 1 in 10 chance. And it's not just a few of these experts, it's like half of the experts. That sounds pretty bad to me. Like, you know, they make the analogy like if, if, if half the avionics engineers said like I'd give that plane a 1 in 10 chance of crashing, would you get on the plane? No, you probably wouldn't get on the plane. So I don't know. I mean, I, I think those concerns are real. I think there are also a lot of other related but important concerns that might not be. So catastrophic is that, but get really dark and dystopian if you take them down the road a few steps into the future, and those are important to talk about. Sure, sure, sure. I've seen enough sci-fi movies and television shows to know that it can get pretty dark and dystopian. It's a funny thing, right? And speaking of movies, this is, this is one of the things that the folks who don't want any laws will say, your concerns are science fiction. But the real people now, the real ones making this stuff are saying this isn't science fiction, this is really happening. So again, there's all these sort of evasive tactics that I think are thinly veiled attempts to just protect their bottom line. Sure, sure, and I will just say I don't buy that argument either because let's face it, most of what we saw in Minority Report all those years ago. It's kind of real now. I'm right. It's remarkable to me that every with every passing year we managed to knock off one more of those technologies that was seemed so futuristic at the time. All right, so. You know, there have been attempts. One of the other things that you've come out against this, is, um, the, the notion because right now it's just a notion of, of, um, a federal suppression of state's ability to regulate AI um. The White House has made itself, you know, its position clear on that, how it goes about doing that. That's a matter of debate. It's tried to slip in a couple of passages in what, 2 bills? It tried in the big beautiful bill, correct. And then the other one, then it just tried in the what do they call it, the National Defense Authorization Act. Or whatever, like the yearly procedural budget passage for the military, they tried to sneak it in there exactly and so that's not happened, but the latest is that Trump wants to just, as he is want to do, put through an executive order kind of doing that. Now setting aside the legal, you know, support of that. You're not a lawyer and neither am I. What's your take on this because obviously you're against, you know, kind of clearing the path for AI. You want some of those speed bumps, but, uh, here we are finding a Republican White House in tension with Republican states even. Yeah, I was just in Utah. Yes, we have a wonderful brainstorm tech conference there, uh. I was sitting at a dinner with a whole bunch of Republicans and just agreeing left and right about how important it is to make laws that govern this technology and in fact that for many of them it's it's around kids, right? It's supporting a lot of kids that's definitely an alignment on that yeah but it's about kids, but. Also for Republicans who are in favor of things like competition, sometimes you need laws to make sure that there is a fair playing ground for business and competition to flourish, so that there was a lot of talk about that too, and Utah has actually done more than just about any other state to regulate AI and besides right wing and left wing lawmakers, I think the public, yeah, left, right and center, and I've, you know, looked at polls about this. They want regulation on AI. They don't trust these big businesses to do what's in the best interests of normal people. They know that that's, they, they know that these businesses can't do that. And it's not because the businesses are full of bad people, not at all. It's because if you're a business. And everyone here at the Fortune event probably knows this better than I do. Like if you're a business, you have to try to do good business. If you try to prioritize the public good, if you try to take the high road, you're just going to get beat by a competitor who's taking the low road. You can't really prioritize the public good if you're a business. That's why there needs to be an interplay between the private sector and, you know, laws and, and. Every other sector that impacts people's lives have laws. They, you know, whether it's the companies building cars or the companies who have banks or the companies making medicine, whatever, everybody has to follow some laws. Why should, why should the companies building this technology not have to follow any laws? It doesn't really make any sense. Indeed, we even have international laws about the use of nuclear force, so you know, cheers. Um, you posted on your social media recently something that resonated with me quite a lot as the father of two boys. Now my boys are young. I have a 5 year old and a 3 month old, as quite a few. Thank you, as quite a few of you know because he was born in the middle of the last brainstorm that we had. Um, it was about artificial intelligence in toys, um. You have 3 kids. I can already feel the dad energy coming off of off of you on that subject, but tell me a little bit more about that again as a dad, uh, that, uh, the AI is seeping into, I mean, we usually talk about AI in the sense of the LLMs and chatbots and interactions that way, but toys is a whole another ball game. Yeah, well, so. We're not against our kids using technology and, and my kids do use computers quite a bit. Um, I think there's lots of great stuff you can do, um, like shout out to Beast Academy and the Art of problem solving. It's like that's that's the one we found, uh, that teaches math so super well. um, one of my sons is really new at music and makes music with the computer amazingly, uh, and we let them spend a lot of time doing that. But these kinds of tools are different than addictive algorithms that are designed to prey on your human weakness and suck up as much of your time and attention as possible and make sure that you keep coming back. Um, that's the same technique is like a slot machine really. There's reasons why there's laws that don't let kids go into casinos and play slot machines and the psychological technique. Used to get gambling addicts hooked to slot machines are the same exact psychological techniques studied at Stanford and other places in Silicon Valley that make their products addictive. For sure. It doesn't make sense to have kids using these things. It's just it's bad for their brain and then when you get into AI companions. Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, even deeper when you're a kid. There's, as far as I understand, um, I was talking to the, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt about this and any parent out there, I highly recommend his book, The Anxious Generation. Um, and he was saying there's a, there's quite a bit of scientific evidence that shows that when, when young brains are developing. It's human interactions that really help develop those neural pathways, and an AI toy or whatever chatbot you want will imitate those human interactions, but they don't develop those neural pathways in the same way because it's fake because you're not talking to a human, you're talking to an algorithm that's designed to hook you and keep you and ultimately serve you ads. It's very different than speaking to another person. And you know whether we're talking neurologically, you should use your common sense as a parent and you're trying to raise a kid who's going to be a strong and compassionate and smart feeling person. To me it's pretty obvious that you're going down a very bad path if you're subjecting them to this synthetic. intimacy that these companies are selling. Who knew that the 90s chat rooms would be the, the good thing, you know, because it was other humans, you know, think of that, think of that. Um, anyway, um, alright, let's, let's change gears a little bit and talk about you as a creator, OK, um, because I mean you just said, you know, one of your kids plays music. I do too. There are AI music tools. How do you feel about that? So, um. You know, you have definitely strong opinions working in Hollywood in terms of the impact of AI on creativity. Um, have you The dangers are clear. Do you feel, do you find any hope in what you can use as a person who Acts, produces, writes, you know, any, any creative goodness in all that. Well sure, the idea that, you know, uh, like I used to make so many videos when I was a little kid, and the idea that, you know, a couple of 10 year olds or something could use these tools to make a movie and have it look as good as, you know, the Hollywood big shots can make their movies look bad. Great, that's unequivocally great. My only concern is where's the economics because right now the way the companies are positioning it is they've built their models out of stolen content and data, didn't ask permission. They aren't offering compensation or they are kind of offering compensation, uh, here and there, but mostly they're claiming, no, this is fair use, we don't have to offer compensation, which sort of turns them into hypocrites, the fact that. They they've paid a few companies or maybe I guess they're just covering their bets or maybe it shows that they don't actually have a moral stance here, they're just trying to make money, um, but they've built their models out of stolen stuff. And their claim is that OK, whenever these tools are used 100% of the economic upside should go to the tech companies and 0% of the economic upside should go to all the people whose writing and voices and art and creativity and labor and time and skill and perspective went into making these products valuable. These products would have zero value, would be able to do zero things without all of that human input. So why shouldn't some of those humans get paid? I think it's actually a principle that applies far beyond entertainment. This is something that if we're going to have a functioning economy moving into the future as this tech gets more and more common. We need to establish the principle that if someone does some good work, has a good idea, makes that idea happen, puts it out into the world, they're allowed to gain economic value from it. But if an AI company is allowed to just take it for free and monetize it without paying that person, how is capitalism going to work anymore? Right, right. So I, I, I see it going down a pretty dystopian road unless we can establish. this principle that your digital self, your thoughts, your ideas, your work belongs to you and any economic upside from that should be shared with you totally, totally. I, I wanna come to the audience for one question before we wrap, uh, but I, I wanna ask you a very simple one before that which is just, um, if some of these things were worked out, you as a, I will just call you a Hollywood creative to take all the roles and wrap them into one. Um, would you in fact use AI tools for your work? I'm not against the technology. Yeah, if, if it were set up ethically and people were getting fairly compensated and we had all the proper upgrades to our systems to make this work fairly, absolutely, yeah, this could propel a great. Leap forward in our creativity, but I think if we, if we leave it as it is, it will only just serve to concentrate power in the hands of a few enormous companies, and that's not really good for anybody. Understood. All right, one question, please. Yes, right over here. Forgive me, the lights are very bright. Your name and who you're with, please. Yes, OK. 00, that's on. Hi, my name is Steven Messer from Collective I. Thank you for being here. Um, uh, you're obviously a great storyteller, and we've appreciated listening this morning. The hard part is it's the whole room full of AI people, and the story falls apart pretty quickly about how this won't hurt our race for winning. For anyone who watched the destruction of facial recognition, which was a key US industry where we dominated. Where a lot of the other countries were years behind us, privacy advocates stood up and told all the horrible things that could go wrong, that destroyed the ability to get funding. We watched that industry in 6 months go to China. Thankfully, we now have China who's doing the greatest things with facial recognition because the US has no companies left that's there. How is it possible to make the argument that there's no risk at all for the frontier models. Um, when we actually have a live real example. That destroyed an entire key critical industry that is now to potential adversary. Yeah, sure, and, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't protect intellectual property, quite the opposite. And, and I'm not saying that it's OK if China steals somebody's tech like that. stolen. All the different states created so many regulations that nobody was able to get funding and the industry was lost because of that. The slowing it down was enough to make a country that was so far behind us in 6 months the dominant player. That, that is a really good point then, and, and thank you for that context. Look, I would say this stuff isn't simple and we, when we get up on a stage, you have to speak for 20 minutes and you have to speak in pretty broad terms. I think that if we're talking about the basic principle that there should be laws as opposed to no laws, I think that. Logic holds. I think for sure it gets more complicated once you get into the art and craft of good regulation and less than good regulation, and I'm not a lawmaker and I'm not going to lecture us on like what makes effective regulation. I certainly wouldn't say that 100% of laws are good. Uh, and I probably would imagine that any even good piece of regulation probably has drawbacks that you could point to, and anti-regulation arguments often cherry pick those drawbacks and say, therefore we shouldn't have any regulation. I'm saying we have to find a good middle ground. Probably we need some regulation and for sure, to your point, we have to do it in a smart way. Thank you for your question, Joe, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you.