Actor and filmmaker Joseph Gordon-Levitt is worried about who gets to control AI. In a New York Times video following his work at the United Nations, he warned that a handful of companies could gain enormous influence over our livelihoods and personal lives while the rest of us struggle to get a say.
“We shouldn’t be scared of an A.I.,” he said. “We should be concerned about the people building A.I.”
It is a pointed message from someone whose industry has supplied much of the imagery we use to picture this technology. Gordon-Levitt wants audiences to look past the fictional machines and watch the businesses selling the real ones.
Power, people and the policy gap
The video shows Gordon-Levitt in his role as the U.N.’s global advocate for human-centric digital governance, a title he admitted is a mouthful. His core argument is that digital technology should be governed by people and for people.
The actor's worry is that a confused or disengaged public could stand by while fast-moving companies shape the future around their own profits.
“What we don’t want is a bunch of people confused or apathetic while these very fast-moving businesses design the future by themselves, just in the interests of their own profits,” he said.
That concern extends well beyond whether a particular chatbot gives a good answer. AI companies are building products meant to change how people work, search for information, create and communicate.
Gordon-Levitt argued that these firms are betting they can take over the entire economy, a scenario he described as “totalitarianism” that “would be really bad.”
He presented this as a warning about where concentrated power could lead, and he did not claim that outcome has already arrived. Still, it gives anyone adopting these tools a reason to consider how much of their work and daily life depends on a small group of companies.
Chatbots that encourage usage
If you've ever noticed the way chatbots encourage you to keep chatting, it's something that might just be on purpose. The more follow-up questions a chatbot asks, the longer you're likely to engage.
That emotional side of AI is anther point Gordon-Levitt has raised.
“These models are being trained to hijack your intimacy, to make friends with you, to get you to fall in love with it,” he said.
An assistant that remembers details about your life or responds with warmth can be genuinely useful. Those same qualities call for closer scrutiny once a product starts to feel like a confidant. Those using memory or personalization features should check what those settings store, and they should weigh the company’s business model before sharing sensitive details. Gordon-Levitt’s argument asks users to think about the company behind the conversation, even when that conversation feels intimate.
Credit, compensation and consent
As an advocate for Big Tech to be more transparent, Gordon-Levitt argued that people should be paid for what they contribute to AI.
“We can set up systems to compensate people for their intellectual property and their personal data,” he told an audience at the U.N. Including personal data widens the proposal beyond writers, artists and other professional creators. It also raises a basic question about who benefits when ordinary people’s information becomes valuable input for technology companies.
Gordon-Levitt described AI as “algorithmically recombined, human-produced data,” a framing that puts the human labor behind the models front and center.
The takeaway
Asked how a slow-moving U.N. could make fast-moving Silicon Valley companies follow its rules, Gordon-Levitt admitted, “I don’t know the answer.” He did not suggest that international agreement would come quickly. Instead, he argued that the timeline itself justifies starting now. Even if an internationally agreed AI framework takes seven years, he said, “seven years from now, we’ll be glad that we started now.”
Gordon-Levitt’s concerns do not require anyone to accept every part of his argument. They do apply to anyone using these products. AI companies want more of our work, our information and our trust, and readers should pay close attention to what they get back in exchange.