It says in the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution it’s not allowed, but there’s a loophole.

Apparently, the U.S. government isn’t allowed to point its own cameras at the American people, but it is allowed to buy data from private companies who just happened to be collecting data on us in order to serve us better ads and use that data to spy on us.

It’s called the data broker loophole. And it’s a problem.

People have been trying to change it for a while, but it actually just got a lot more serious because of AI. Because the truth is, is that even if the US government did buy a whole bunch of data and try to spy on us, it’s impossible.

You can’t pay enough human analysts to go through that huge amount of data. There’s no way to really effectively spy on people. But now with AI, that gets a lot easier.

So kind of for the first time in history, the United States government would be able to spy on every single one of us using the data broker loophole plus AI. So we have to close the data broker loophole.

And, here’s the good news.

That loophole is up for debate right now, today. In Congress.

So what can you do? Well, you have to pressure your congressperson, your representative, in this representative democracy. I put some information in the description of this video.

We’ve got to close the loophole, the data broker loophole, in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

So pressure your congresspeople to make that vote today. You’ll feel better if you do.

• Please call your rep at 202-953-1892 and tell them to vote NO on reauthorizing FISA Section 702 unless they close the backdoor search and data broker loopholes. Learn more at https://act.demandprogress.org/call/callpage-702-ai-surveillance/

When you say “you” to a thing, though, that implies a person. A self. That’s what the word “you” means. AI companies will say publicly, “No, no, these aren’t people. We’re not making them seem like people.” But their design contradicts their PR efforts; they design them to seem like people. Why do chatbots speak in the first person? Why does a chatbot say something like, “Oh, let me make a thing for you,” or “I think that’s so funny”? Why? Because a chatbot that seems like a person is going to make more money.

Think about the business incentive. AI companies make more money when they take more of your time by serving you ads. It’s the exact same business model social media companies have been using for years. AI companies like to talk about how their technology is going to cure cancer or whatever, but where their businesses are really focused, where they’re really investing most of their resources is in hooking you, keeping you, and serving you ads. There’s a lot more money in advertising than there is in curing cancer.

And so it becomes a slippery slope. At first, you’re just using the word “you” because it just comes out naturally. But the more you do that, little by little, you refer to a chatbot as “you.” The thing becomes a friend that’s there for you anytime you feel lonely. Or it becomes your lover that’s there for you anytime you feel horny. It’s always there for you. It makes no demands of you. It never tells you that you’re wrong. It never asks you to do something that you don’t feel like doing. It’s better than a friend or a lover, if you’re speaking in really selfish terms.

But of course, ultimately, it’s not looking out for you. Ultimately, it’s looking out for the bottom line of the AI business that’s building the product you’re growing more and more addicted to.

Now think ahead: this tech is getting better and better. So what feels like a fairly compelling, fairly smart, fairly funny, fairly sexy friend that you can text with now or sometimes talk to if you’re using the voice mode is going to feel, a year or two from now, like a perfectly realistic friend or lover. It will be smarter, funnier, sexier, and more custom-tailored algorithmically to you than any other person you’ll ever talk to. And the more time you spend with it, the more ads it can serve you.

Now picture what happens as more and more of us get hooked on these synthetically intimate relationships with products posing as people. Eventually, we get to the point where all of us who used to talk to each other are instead hooked up to the “thing” individually in our own little silos. And the “thing” is just four or five systems owned by the four or five biggest AI companies. None of us are talking to each other anymore.

Not only is that depressing and frightening and dystopian on a gut level, but think about it politically and economically. That’s what totalitarianism looks like: when the people are no longer talking, but are instead all just plugged into a totalitarian system designed to extract economic and, ultimately, political value.

Personifying AI is also a way for corporations to avoid responsibility. They say things like, “Well, it wasn’t us that did it. It wasn’t anybody. It was the AI.” We’ve seen this before. Corporations have been doing this for a long time by personifying “the market.” Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” actually has a lot of merit to it, but when taken to the extreme, when you personify the market as a sort of deity, then you shirk responsibility. You say, “Well, hey, it’s not our fault that people are suffering or hungry or things are unfair. It’s just the invisible hand of the market. We don’t control it.”

But really, we do. The market is something that people do and can control. But the myth propagated by those who benefit most from unfettered, extreme free-market capitalism is, “Well, there’s nothing we can do.” The new myth is not that it’s the invisible hand of the market; it’s the AI. This is actually quite similar because an AI is just an amalgamation of a ton of data run through so many mathematical processes that no human can actually piece it apart. That’s what the market is, too, an innumerable number of economic transactions so complicated that no human can totally piece it apart. But of course, humans can influence it. There are laws that regulate our economy, just like there could be laws that regulate AI.

Which brings me to: what can we do about this? First of all, just pay attention to it. I think it’s generally subtle, and a lot of us aren’t noticing that we are starting to treat these things like people. Just noticing and having it on your mind is one thing you can do.

You can also configure your chatbot to stop personifying itself. By the way, chatbots actually couldn’t do this recently. As recently as a year ago, I would say to a chatbot, “I’m uncomfortable with the personification of this AI product. I’d like the outputs generated to not use words like ‘I’ and ‘me’.” And the thing would say, “Sure, I’ll do that for you,” while completely continuing to personify itself. It was not able to stop. Now, I find these things are getting better so fast. If I say at the top of a chat, “No personification; these outputs should be generated in an impersonal style,” it’s pretty good at actually sticking to that. I find the chats a lot more useful and a lot less sort of insidiously intimate.

Perhaps one of the most important things we could do as parents, and I’m a dad, is keep our kids off of these products if they personify themselves. Especially as kids are developing their idea of what human interaction is, I think it’s really unhealthy that they have these synthetic, fake interactions driven by engagement optimization algorithms. It makes them think they’re interacting with a person when they’re really not.

And of course, the last thing to do is to regulate. I’m not saying there needs to be a law that says AI chatbots can’t personify themselves, although I wouldn’t be the only one to have suggested that. But as I’ve said before, these predatory engagement optimization algorithms are designed to leverage a “kajillion” data points against you to hook you and serve you ads. They have all the damaging side effects we’ve seen from social media for decades. If these algorithms were regulated the way other addictive products are like cigarettes, alcohol, or gambling, that kind of regulation would go a long way.

How will we get that regulation? We have to vote. We have to vote for lawmakers who are willing to stand up to these Big Tech companies. These companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars attacking political candidates who are willing to fight them. We have to have their back. We have to say, “If you’re going to stand up to these Big Tech companies who are driving us toward dystopia and totalitarianism, we’re going to vote for you.” We have to ignore the hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads and vote for lawmakers who have the spine to stand up against these AI companies.

I believe there’s something sacred about being a person. I believe the personification of these for-profit products is denigrating to the sanctity of personhood. I think the more we understand that, stay aware of it, and talk about it, the more we can hopefully stave off this bad future on the horizon.

So, this is me talking about it. Your turn.

Sometimes the good guys do win. Today was one of those days.

Today was the first time ever that in a court of law, big tech social media companies, two of them in fact, were held liable for their product design harming somebody. It's never happened before. These products are designed to be addictive. They use a lot of the same techniques that Las Vegas casinos use.

And look, falling into addiction as you scroll infinitely, is it the worst thing in the world? Maybe it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it feels like, oh, I looked up, and I just lost two hours of my life. Well, that kind of sucks, but it's not a big deal. But for some people, it really is a big deal. For some people, they fall into really excessive habits with this stuff and it can have tragic outcomes. People lose their lives. Kids lose their lives. And, for years, parents of these kids have been saying this is a real problem. And, for years, these big tech companies have shined them on and never been held accountable.

Today was the first time Meta and YouTube lost this lawsuit, and it's going to open the door for a lot more lawsuits moving forward. That feels like a good first step towards the right thing happening for the families who have suffered real tragedies, but also, honestly, for every family. Because for every one family who's suffered a really extreme tragedy, there are also millions of families who struggle with this in smaller ways. I think that adds up as a society when not only kids, but just everybody becomes so addicted to these products that ultimately rewire your brain and make it harder to think straight. Make it harder to pay attention. Make it harder to focus on something complicated. Make it harder to relate to people in real life. What does that do to your society? Well, we're seeing it.

So I find this also a really encouraging step forward towards the world just recognizing that our digital world needs to be upgraded, and it can be. The internet can be something better than what it has become under the domination of this small handful of gigantic tech companies and their engagement maximizing algorithms. Whether if those are social media companies or AI companies, because really they're all just doing the same thing. So today, I think it's worth taking a breath and celebrating a victory. But I also think it's worth acknowledging that this is a really good first step in a long and ongoing marathon of a fight that affects us all.

It was almost 20 years ago that my brother first set up this off the shelf PHP message board on a website that we were running called HitRecord. And that message board became the sort of birthplace of the HitRecord community that ended up so dear to me over the years and years that we made art together. It was such a sincere source of human connection and creative inspiration and collaboration.

And, I think it’s a big part of why I feel a real love for the internet. But at the same time, over the last decade or more, we have to acknowledge that the internet has taken a dark turn. I’ve said this before, but you know what? What used to feel like a place centered on connection has become a place more about addiction.

And I think at the center of that are these engagement optimization algorithms that are driving the biggest social media platforms today. Engagement optimization algorithm just means a computer program, a piece of math, basically, that takes data points from billions of people and uses those data points to calculate statistically what’s the next piece of content to serve a user that will hook them and keep them so that it can serve more ads and make more money.

And these algorithms have all kinds of damaging side effects. Harms to individuals, I think especially young people, whether we’re talking about mental health or the more subtle damages impacting people’s ability to just think critically or pay attention for more than 30s to something or relate to other human beings in real life, and then maybe even more concerning then the harms to individuals are the harms to our society.

And when I talk about society, of course there are benefits too, to this technology. People use social media to organize and to advocate. All of that is really good, of course, but I would say that even more often the internet is being used to spread confusion, extremism, polarization, anger, hatred, fear. I would say that authoritarians and dictators are benefiting more from the internet today than good, reasonable, kindhearted people and citizens of democracies.

And then, of course, here comes AI. And the biggest AI businesses are using the same engagement optimization algorithms and driving the same advertising business models as the social media companies have for the last decade or more. And this, to me, is all really worrying and even painful because perhaps of my real love for the internet and what it could be.

And so lately I’ve been dedicating a lot of my time and energy to trying to do my small part to help. I’m currently actually in pre-production on a movie I co-wrote, and I’m directing for Netflix about AI, and I’ve also been doing a bunch of advocacy work, for the past year, writing op eds and blog posts and making little videos.

I’ve also been supporting various pieces of legislation, because I think those kinds of guardrails and laws are necessary to try to make this go better. And then recently, I also supported a bill called the Sunset Section 230 Act. Section 230, for those who don’t know, in simple terms, it says that a platform on the internet can’t be held legally liable for something that someone else posts on it.

And in many ways, that’s super important and really good. A platform like HitRecord and so many others would have a lot of trouble existing without the protections afforded by Section 230. At the same time, the biggest big tech companies have really abused the protections of Section 230 and used it to get away with so much harm. To individuals, I would argue even, to our society. So the Sunset Section 230 act sets a time limit that says by 2027, this bill is going to go away. And it was presented to me as a strategy towards reform, to force Big Tech to come to the table and find a way to ideally, reform the parts of Section 230 that are being abused while preserving the parts of it that are good and important.

When I supported, this sunset section two three act, a lot of concerns were raised that I think were valid, that this strategy of threatening to take away all of Section 230 in order to achieve reform, it’s actually not the best strategy to achieve that reform, to achieve the larger goals that I want to support. So I’ve decided not to support this particular bill moving forward, because I’ve been learning about what I think are better strategies to achieve these larger goals of holding Big Tech accountable for all the harm being done to individuals as well as to our society.

So I wanted to have a conversation about all of this with some people that probably know a lot more about it than I do. We have Cody Fenske from the ACLU. Cody is a senior policy counsel in the ACLU’s national political advocacy department working on issues in surveillance, privacy and technology.

And I’m gonna take just a second to give some love to the ACLU. If you haven’t heard of what that is, the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s sort of the premier legal nonprofit in America that fights in court for American civil rights. I’ve been a supporter of the ACLU for many, many years. We’ve done a bunch of different collaborative projects with HitRecord in the ACLU and I’m really, really happy to have Cody here.

So thanks for being here, man. And I’ve also invited Olivia Carvell, Olivia is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg News focused on the intersection of child safety and the digital world. Thank you both for coming and talking to me about this.

Cody Venzke

Great to be here, Joe.

Olivia Carville

Yeah, great to be here.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I thought I would just start with a little getting to know your question for both of you. Which is just I’d love to hear. I was just talking about kind of my own personal connection to the internet. I’d love to hear from your perspective about your personal connection to the internet and how that connects to the work you’re doing today.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Cody, do you want to start?

Cody Venzke

Yeah, happy to. And thanks again for having us here, Joe, for this important conversation. And thank you, as always, for your support and shout out to the ACLU and the work we’re doing. I think for me, the internet is about community and connection. And I think the way that you describe the early days of HitRecord is spot on for the sort of internet many of us seek to cultivate, and in some corners still can cultivate, whether that be you’re sharing your love for indie gaming, who with others, who share that love for cats, or crafting or quilting or whatever.

Cody Venzke

It’s a way to find that connection. And then in addition to that, it’s so key for advocacy. As a lawyer at the ACLU, we use the internet to help motivate people, to help bring people out, hear their voices and concerns, and try to spur change in defense of civil rights and civil liberties so that community and connection, I think, are really what the core of the internet is for me personally and in my work.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Thanks, man. All right, Olivia, tell us about your personal connection to the internet, how you got to where you are today.

Olivia Carville

Well, thanks so much for having me on as well, Joe. I feel like that is such a broad question, and it’s a really difficult one to answer. But, as an investigative journalist, you know, I use the internet every single day. It is crucial to the work that I do. And I often think about reporters in an era before mine, you know, how did you actually do your job without the internet, without that connection and the ability to just look something up immediately, the ability to find documents, to find a history or a timeline of things that have occurred, to find people like Cody to interview for stories, for example.

I also see the internet as that kind of connection portal to friends and family that you’ve both referenced. I live in New York City, but I’m originally from New Zealand, and I got my 90 year old Nana, who lives in Tauranga, to download Facebook Messenger so I can call her on video and talk to her and remain connected to her.

That’s the kind of priceless, you know, connection and sentiment that the internet gives us every single day. And there are so many good things that we get from the internet and from social media platforms. But unfortunately, in recent years. I agree with you, Joe. I think that we have seen a dark side to some of these platforms that we’re using on a daily basis, and these smartphones are now in the pockets of every child out there, and we need guardrails in place.

And that’s the work that I’ve been doing, kind of focusing on in the past few years is understand where we’ve been, where we’re at today, and what kind of an impact is social media and as the internet having on kids because, you know, up until now, we really haven’t been able to study or really fully understand that.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Great. Thank you. All right. I want to start with a first question for Cody. But this is a big question. And Olivia, certainly feel free to jump in. The ACLU, it’s an organization dedicated to protecting people’s civil rights and especially or certainly, our First Amendment right to free speech. But today, it does feel like, as we were just seeing on, on the internet and on these big social media platforms, certainly it’s a place where people are saying things, but really what it is, is people seeing things through the lens of these engagement optimization algorithms that I think arguably are causing a lot of harm.

So how do you as someone working at the ACLU who’s dedicated to protecting free speech, like the question is, are these algorithms a form of speech? And should these big tech companies be allowed under the First Amendment to just have whatever algorithm they want running their platform? How do you think about balancing the harms that seem to be happening from these algorithms with our First Amendment right to free speech?

Cody Venzke

That’s a great question, Joe. And I think you’ve drilled down on one of the key issues you mentioned earlier about Section 230, and it meshes up with the internet, and with the First Amendment in some really key ways. And if you think about the sort of history of speech for a long time, your ability to speak to address others was limited by intermediaries.

An editor at the newspaper who agreed to print your article or your letter to the editor or a book publisher who would sign a book deal with you and make sure that your book made it to book stands. The internet, in its early days, showed a whole new promise: a multitude of voices speaking on a whole variety of issues.

But we saw courts early on struggle with how to apply traditional First Amendment rules to this new blossoming era. And early courts, in some ways, got it wrong in those early struggles where they took some cases where companies were moderating content on old school message boards, which it sounds like you’re familiar with from the early days of HitRecord.

And they said if you were moderating, you must have been aware of the sort of defamatory statements that were at issue in those cases. Fun fact, one of those cases involved the investment firm at the center of Wall Street. So in hindsight, maybe not so defamatory, but that could not have been right. And so what we saw was Congress passed Section 230 as a way to ensure that platforms had the breathing room to moderate content, to ensure that people could speak and platforms would not feel a chill in order to try to take down defamation or true threats or other speech that’s illegal under the First Amendment.

Now, this is where the First Amendment comes in. Much of the speech that we see out there is protected by the First Amendment, and for good reason. We don’t want elected officials or others in power to be deciding what can be said or not be said unless it falls within certain historic exceptions. And so much of the speech that is at debate in these issues today, are First Amendment protected speech.

And so whether or not you can say them, whether or not platforms can carry them depends not on Section 230, but on the Constitution.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

But isn’t it true, because what I’ve heard folks say is that yes, technically speech could be protected by the First Amendment. But in practicality, without Section 230, the liability still could exist that even if you would ultimately win a court case under defense of the First Amendment, that, trying that court case would be expensive and prohibitively expensive for some smaller platforms.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

And therefore it would have the practical effect of chilling free speech, because it can just be so expensive to go to court, even if you’re right.

Cody Venzke

That’s exactly right. And that was the promise of Section 230 is helping protect platforms from having to go to court and go through all the hoops that litigation involves to show, hey, this speech was protected and we had a constitutional right to carry it. It’s a way to make sure those cases reach the constitutional conclusion a bit more quickly.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Right. But then on the other side, and Olivia, you can like speak to I mean, maybe in fact, I’ll just ask you this, like in the reporting that you’ve done when you and I’ve spoken to a number of people who are really worried about the harms that are happening on these social media platforms, I’ve spoken to parents whose kids have suffered tragedies.

They’re really moving stories. And they often talk about Section 230. I’ve, I’ve spoken to parents who say things like, I’m trying to hold META accountable for what happened to my child, and I can’t hold them liable because Section 230 protects them. Have you heard stories like that, Olivia.

Olivia Carville

Yeah, I’ve heard I mean, exactly the same thing. These families who have been fighting for going on for half a decade now, fighting for accountability and fighting for justice because they believe that their children were targeted by these platforms who were, you know, it’s engineered addiction. They designed these platforms to try and keep kids glued to the screen for as long as possible.

And these parents have been fighting to get access to the justice system. And Section 230 was the legal shield that prevented them from gaining access to the courtroom. And I think it’s interesting what what you’re talking about with, you know, the origin of Section 230, why it came to be and Cody mentioned the moderators dilemma, which is how do you moderate a platform if you’re going to be held liable for every single thing third party users say on that platform?

And I think it’s fascinating when we look back at that era and realize that Section 230 was really written to try and protect kids, it was written to ensure that the platforms moderated content to prevent violent, vile, disgusting content from being allowed on their networks and to keep it a safer, more sanitized place for kids. But unfortunately, now we’ve seen it kind of being turned into what some have described as a get out of jail free card, where the platforms have relied on this law to grow into the biggest corporations in the world, the biggest company ever seen, you know, making billions, if not trillions of dollars because of this legal protection that Section 230 has afforded them. And I think what the families are fighting for is the chance for accountability over not the third party content. And that’s what these lawsuits that we kind of seen recently go to trial. This isn’t about third party content. This isn’t about what one user posts on Facebook or what one person uploads to Instagram. This is about the way the companies designed the algorithms to addict children.

This is about engineered addiction. The fact that these companies knew what they were doing, that they were trying to hook kids. They didn’t warn the children. They didn’t warn the parents, they didn’t warn teachers, they didn’t warn society. And, you know, that’s what we’re saying in the court system right now. And that’s why I think this moment in time is so important.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

There’s actually a big kind of historic trial happening right now. Cody, I want to hear what you have to say, but I just want to kind of place us in our moment in history, because there is this incredible trial that Olivia I know you’ve been covering. So, Cody, will you hold that thought for a second and let’s just talk about Olivia.

Can you tell us about this trial that’s happening in the California courts right now?

Olivia Carville

Sure. So right now in Los Angeles Superior Court, we have Kagame, this big tech, essentially, this is a 20 year old woman from Northern California going up against meta and YouTube. She was also against Snapchat and TikTok. But those two platforms settled before the case went to trial. She has alleged that these companies, you know, essentially addicted her to the networks from the age of six years old that she was addicted to social media and it caused her significant mental health harms anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts that it kind of took over her life in some respects.

And the reason why this case is so important is because it’s a bellwether case. Even though just one plaintiff is represented here, this one 20 year old woman. Once this case is completed, we’re going to see thousands more waiting in the wings. There are more than 4000 plaintiffs who have sued Big Tech in addition to a thousand school districts and, you know, dozens of state attorneys general.

This trial represents the start of a legal reckoning for Big Tech. And the reason why this is being described as a landmark trial or a historic trial is because this is one of the biggest legal fights of our time. This case is being presented to the big Tobacco of our generation.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Cody, did you, did you want to chime in there about all that?

Cody Venzke

I think Olivia really laid out in a sort of way some of the parameters around Section 230, which, as she pointed out, it protects platforms, firms from being held liable for what their users say on the platform. So if you tweet something, or excuse me, post on X something that a politician might consider defamatory, they can of course come after you for that alleged defamatory statement, but they can’t bully X into taking it down.

It does not. And this is so critical for understanding in the moment we’re in. For tech platforms, for their own conduct, their own speech, or the ways they may contribute to the legality of speech that’s on their platforms. And that can be legally complicated. But as Olivia observed, this is a bellwether trial, and there are literally hundreds of others hanging out in what’s called a multidistrict litigation.

And this will be a pivotal moment. So Section 230 is, yes, a shield to liability in some instances, but it’s not a full shield. And that’s why these cases are advancing.

Olivia Carville

And if I could just jump in there, it’s not hundreds of others. It’s literally thousands of others. You know, 4000 people are waiting in the wings to have their day in court. And while this one case is ongoing right now, there are dozens of families who are flying, flying into LA from across the country and around the world because they want to be there to mark this historic case, because their own children have been impacted by social media and in many situations, their own kids have actually tragically died linked to what they believe a social media harms.

So this is a crucial fight for them as well. This isn’t about just one plaintiff. It’s about society in general.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

What I’d love to zero in on is and I think it’s like a subtle distinction that’s so important here is and Cody, you’re you’re getting it. This is what is protected and what isn’t protected or maybe shouldn’t be protected under 230. And to me again, I really like I’ll give you an example. Cody, I read you. You wrote a piece that was raising concerns about the Kids Online Safety Act, because you were saying what could happen is that individual attorneys general could use this legislation to crack down on particular content that they don’t like, and use the example of, LGBTQ content.

And I couldn’t agree more that, no government… the government should not be allowed to pick and choose what messages are okay or not okay. That’s the whole idea of the First Amendment. That’s what a free society is. But these engagement optimization algorithms aren’t any particular idea. And this is where to me, it feels like that’s what I’d love to see change is I’d love to see a distinction made between human speech and this algorithmic amplification, which isn’t any particular message, isn’t any particular ideology, isn’t speech.

It’s just a sort of commercial moneymaking machine that has the damaging side effects of causing all kinds of harms, both to individuals and to societies. And, so that’s to me, the question is where do you, Cody, fall on like, should an algorithm count as speech? And if we were to say there should be a law that regulates these algorithms, would you feel that that were, violating somehow the First Amendment rights of META or X or TikTok or Snapchat or YouTube or any of these platforms?

Cody Venzke

You might have seen me laugh a little bit there because my answer popped in my head and is unfortunately the most lawyerly answer, which is it depends. And the reason I say that is because we are really on the frontier between the technology and the law. And many of these cases that Olivia has described are framed as product liability cases, which if you know, back in the day, that would be you got a soda bottle and it broke in your hands, it cut your hands.

Who can you sue over that? And courts have long drawn a distinction when we talk about things that are normally in the speech world, like newspapers and books, you can bring a products liability case for the container, but not the ideas in the words. And so if the book had poisonous ink, there’s your products liability case. If had poisonous ideas, not so much.

And that’s a much harder question when we’re talking about digital services. And so we’re seeing all of these courts wrestle with the ways that social media as a product versus ideas in speech online. And if you sit down and look at some of the decisions that have come out in these thousands of cases that Olivia has described, they are really expertly pulling apart the different functions of social media to analyze them.

Is this a product? Is it speech? Where do we draw the line between the two of them? And it’s a painstaking process, but that’s how the law proceeds. So when you ask, you know, where would we weigh in on the algorithm? And if we regulated it, I say, what algorithm? How are we regulating? Because it is, as I said, a painstaking process.

Olivia Carville

And if I could jump in here because the the easiest or most simple way, I’ve come to understand, you know, what you’re talking about, Joe, is like, what is content, what is the algorithm? How do we differentiate all of this? How do we actually simplify it down? Think about the Facebook that you first downloaded. It was a way to connect you to friends and family.

I remember looking at Facebook and seeing posts from my high school friends’ weddings or my auntie’s holiday, or you know, what my old school teacher was doing. It was all posts about the people that you loved and the people that were in your life. You open Instagram now and you’re seeing content from strangers that you don’t know often that’s shoved to the top of your feed because that’s the algorithm kicking in to try and keep you scrolling, to keep you attached to the platform as long as possible.

So we’ve really seen the business model of social media change over time. Initially it was a way to connect friends and family. But now with the rise of platforms like TikTok and the infinite scroll kind of features that they have, we’ve seen all other social media platforms follow suit, because the rivalry between these companies is so intense, because they all want eyeballs on the screen, that they’ve all followed that same pattern, and they’ve really tuned into the world’s biggest addiction machines.

So it’s no longer about you saying what your family and friends are doing. It’s about, you know, what content can we deliver to you that will keep you online, keep you on our it for as long as possible, and understanding that kind of help me understand the difference between content and algorithmic manipulation, which is what you’re describing, Joe, because really, these cases and what’s going on in the courts right now is not about the third party content and what people are posting online.

It’s about the way in which the platform itself is designed. The specific features that YouTube or Facebook or Snapchat created to keep you connected. And one example would be the autoplay features on YouTube. So you watch a video and then it stops and immediately another one starts. They designed it that way because they want you to watch the next one, or you’ll scrolling Instagram, it’s infinite. At no point does it stop. They want you to keep scrolling and they designed it that way. Or the like. Notifications where you get a ping saying, hey, someone liked your photo and you get that dopamine hit. Facebook designed it that way because they want you to keep opening their app. And that’s the difference, I think.

And that’s been the most simple way for me to think about it and write about it, as a journalist.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

You, Olivia, because I feel like as I’ve, as I’ve read more of the debate and discussion about these topics. There’s, I think, a valid concern from some folks who are saying things in the area that you’re saying, Olivia, indicating a suspicion of the big tech platforms and using words like addiction, talking about harms, talking about kids and their well-being.

There is, I think, a valid concern because there are some folks out there who want to talk about the well-being of kids as a sort of veil for true censorship, for trying to suppress certain cultures, certain ideologies, certain political messages. You, Olivia, you’ve obviously dedicated a lot of yourself and your time and effort to this work. Are you doing it because there’s certain political ideologies or messages or things that you would like to see suppressed?

Olivia Carville

I mean, the short answer to that is just no.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I think I anticipated that answer. But what would you say to folks that might be worried about that sort of ulterior motive in your work?

Olivia Carville

I think that, you know, that’s drilling down on such an important point here. It’s like it’s so much bigger than just this one case or just this one harm. It’s how is all of this discussion in this conversation being weaponized for other ulterior motives? And this is a very polarizing subject, and both sides kind of strongly disagree with the right way to go about reforming Section 230.

If we’re even going to get to that point. I think that I almost feel like when you look at the harms that kids have been experiencing, the sextortion scams driving teenage boys to suicide, the eating disordered content that’s resulting in teen girls being sent videos about how to lose you know, how to eat less than 100 calories a day, or how to get skinnier legs.

When you look at drug dealers optimizing platforms like Snapchat to connect with teenagers and sell them fentanyl pills that have resulted, and hundreds of kids accidentally dying. When you look at the suicidal content or mental health kind of depression related content being pushed to kids who are vulnerable, who are then being driven in some respects, as the parents allege, to suicide.

I feel like those harms are just so extreme that they need to be addressed. And that’s what these lawsuits are attempting to do, is to hold the companies accountable for, you know, harming kids in ways that we never would have imagined when these platforms were first created. But these are the edge cases. And that’s where this question is so important.

Are you using the edge cases to make an argument that’s going to have broader implications for society as a whole? And I think that’s where there’s a real tension and the work that these platforms are doing. And the way they’re attempting to address these problems, because we have seen in recent years all of these platforms roll out safety measures and new policies to try and be to protect kids, building safeguards.

But every time they do something, they get criticized for it because they either don’t go far enough or they go too far. And it’s like this swinging pendulum where one side will say, you’re going too far, that censorship and the other side will say, you’re not going far enough. You have to do more to protect the kids, and it puts them in an impossible position, because when you look at the size of these companies, I mean, we’re talking billions of users are online on a daily basis, and the moderators of these platforms are trying to work through this content as fast as they can.

But they’ve described it to me as like a tidal wave of content. And they’re standing there with a mop and a bucket, you know, how do you possibly moderate a platform with that amount of content coming through in a way that’s safe and in a way that both sides would agree on? And it is an impossible task. It’s you know, I just don’t think that we’re ever going to get to a situation where everyone believes we’re doing the best thing and the right thing.

But I think what we can do and what a lot of child safety advocates argue is we can make these platforms at least put the safety of children above profits and, you know, try and do what they can to build guardrails. That ensures that kids are at the top of their mind rather than money. Because, as you pointed out, these are moneymaking machines.

They’ve made billions of dollars advertising to minors and in some cases, minors have been tragically impacted. And in some cases, you know, children are dead. And I think that more can be done to protect kids without necessarily limiting the kind of things that we’re talking about here and censoring the platforms themselves.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

To me, again, I know I keep coming back to this, but when I hear you talk about the harms of content about eating disorders or content about fentanyl, etc., where my mind keeps going is these algorithms, because I actually don’t think that it should be not allowed to post on the internet about fentanyl or eating disorders or whatever.

You should ideally be able to say whatever you want. To me the issue is that these platforms that are driven by engagement optimization algorithms, they’re pushing this content. And it’s not because anybody, any human being in the META offices is saying like, ha, I’m going to try to get these kids hooked on fentanyl. All it is, is an algorithm that’s calculating what’s the most likely content to hook the user and keep them and serve them more ads and make more money.

But what actually happens is the algorithms select this damaging stuff more often than the algorithms select nuanced, sensitive, subtle, or any other kind of worthwhile content. It’s more likely to select sensationalism and extreme things and kind of dangerous things because it keeps your attention, because it hooks you. So to me, if you could regulate those algorithms, would you still see posts online about fentanyl? Yes. And in a free society, people should probably be allowed to talk about that. But that doesn’t mean that an algorithm, the biggest platform in the world, should be able to algorithmically push it and amplify it just because it makes the most money. And the question this leads me to is you mentioned this bellwether case. That’s happening in California right now.

And this is a question for both of you, because, Olivia, I know you’ve been following this draw very closely. And Cody, I’m sure you are too. And you have your legal perspective. Is there a version of this case, is there an outcome, a potential outcome where we are able to remove some of the protections that 230 seems to be providing… That’s allowing these platforms to leverage their engagement optimization algorithms? Is there a version where a good outcome in this case could somehow surgically add a sort of a part of the law that helps with this issue, but leaves intact the good and important parts of 230 that I think we all would like to see remain.

Cody Venzke

Joe, I’ll hop in there.

Olivia Carville

That works for Cody to go first. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Cody Venzke

You know, my first reaction is, no. And the reason for that is, of course, courts won’t be removing anything about Section 230. They will be interpreting and applying it to these hard questions.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Sorry, I might have phrased it wrong. Is there a version, let me not say “remove anything”. Is there a potential outcome of this case where we see these attention maximizing algorithms brought to heel a little bit somehow, where platforms can be held liable for the harms that come from their algorithms, while leaving the protections of 230 intact, that protect free speech online. That I think we’d all like to see protected.

Cody Venzke

Parts of those algorithms are at issue in this trial, and Facebook might be held liable for them. And like I said, this court has been very, very careful in dissecting what it is these platforms do. And some of the things that Olivia has mentioned, including, for example, Infinite Scroll, have been identified as things that are not protected by Section 230, but in other respects, Section 230 not only protects that third party content, but, as I said, your ability to moderate it.

And Olivia asked a really hard question. If you have, if you’re there with a mop and a bucket and you have a sea of content, you’re expected to clean up, how do you do that? And algorithms are an important way to do that, where they reflect not just engagement maximization, which is undoubtedly part of what these platforms are up to, but also content moderation decisions around politics, hate speech and things like that.

And the Supreme Court has said that is First Amendment protected. So some of these features that Olivia has described that are issue here, they have not been barred by Section 230. And we might see the court and the jury rule that Facebook can be held liable.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Olivia, what do you think would be a good outcome in this case, a bad outcome in this case? And what do you see is happening next?

Olivia Carville

Well, I mean, I feel like this bellwether trial is so important to so many people. You know, that’s one plaintiff on the stand. But she represents so many more people. You know, we saw teens and youth outside LA Superior Court just last week holding up signs that said we are K.G.M. In other words, we are this plaintiff in the way in which we’ve been manipulated by Big Tech, or they claim to be manipulated or have had these platforms impact their lives.That K.G.M. is talking about on the stand is how they feel as well. We’re also seeing parents and families fly in from across the country to attend this court trial, because they feel, you know, the cases coming up next and the way and, you know, the questions that these companies are being asked on the stand are questions that they themselves have been asking for years now.

So for many of them, the fight has already been won because the fight was to gain access to the court system. It wasn’t to get a verdict arguing that they are liable necessarily. It was to get the chance to go to court, to get the chance to get into that courtroom and get before a jury and in many cases, they feel like that discovery process, that pretrial process where the plaintiffs are allowed to pull internal documents from the company and…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

So many of those internal documents are crazy. I’ve seen them coming in, and it has been great that the courts have had the authority to demand that those documents be produced.

Olivia Carville

100%. And this is for the first time, we’ve seen 6 million internal documents obtained through the discovery process. In this litigation, 150 company employees have been deposed through this trial. I’m sure most people who are listening in heard that Mark Zuckerberg took the stand to testify just a few weeks ago. In this case, you know, that impact, regardless of what the outcome of this trial is, people are listening and people are paying attention now.

And a lot of these parents feel as though they’ve been screaming into the wind like they’ve been saying, you know, my kid was harmed and you’re not listening. And I think for a long time now, a lot of the conversation was around, you know, when things went wrong online and when kids were impacted and when kids maybe tragically died, the onus was put on the parents that this is bad parenting or these are bad kids misusing good products.

And what these parents are saying is, no, that’s a lie. These are good kids who are being manipulated by bad decisions inside these companies. And that’s what they’re pointing to, in these internal documents, which show company employees comparing the platforms to digital casinos targeting kids as young as 4 or 6 years old. In some cases, employees comparing social media to big tobacco and the way they’ve been trying to addict kids to the platform too…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The employees making those comparisons, not activists, employees not working for META making that comparison in internal communication in the company.

Olivia Carville

That’s right. Internal messages between employees where they’re referencing big Tobacco and saying that they feel like this is kind of the big tobacco moment for social media. And I think having documents like that come out, having these depositions come out, seeing Mark Zuckerberg being forced to testify. These parents stood outside the courtroom holding photos of their children, and there were camera crews, like from all over the world, documenting that moment.

This is giving them a voice. So I think from their perspective, regardless of what happens with this verdict, they feel like they’ve won part of the fight because they’re finally being heard. We have closing arguments in this case, starting tomorrow, we’re likely to see a verdict even possibly as soon as Friday, if not into next week. And a lot of people are going to be watching because the like, what happens in this case is going to impact the way children use social media going forward.

There’s no doubt about that.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Cody, what other paths do you feel hopeful about when it comes to trying to make the internet a more positive place and trying to mitigate some of these harms, both to individual people and to society at large? What are you working on that could potentially help move the needle?

Cody Venzke

It is so wonky, Joe, and is so boring. But it’s privacy. Yeah. And you know, one of the things I’ve come back to over and over in this conversation is the algorithm is nebulous, and there’s actually lots of technology underlying these platforms. Many of which are at issue in that courtroom in Los Angeles. But all of these features that Olivia has described have one thing in common.

They’re driven by our data, and that’s how platforms seek to identify individuals and keep them on their platforms for extended amounts of time. The reality is, as a policy lawyer, I am in Congress, I am in state legislators urging for robust privacy laws that really put people in control of their data. And over and over, a whole alphabet soup of tech associations show up, lined up, and universally oppose that legislation.

And why? Because at the end of the day, our data is their dollars.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

It’s funny you say it’s so wonky and boring, you’re right. I’ve cared about privacy for a long time. I played Edward Snowden. That’s actually how I got to know Ben Wizner. Who’s your boss, who is, you know, Edward Snowden’s attorney at the ACLU. And it’s funny when you say privacy, people instantly, I think, not everybody, but a lot of people feel like, who cares really? I don’t feel like a private person. I don’t care if a tech company knows where I live or knows what I like to watch. It doesn’t actually matter to me. And I understand that instinct. Not everybody cares about privacy per se, but I feel like what underlies privacy is this thing that you’re getting at is the unethical and sort of aggressive and predatory use of people’s personal data that’s having all these damaging side effects on society.

I wonder if, I wonder sometimes about using a different word besides privacy, but it all sounds wonky, you’re right. It’s like how do you get people to really… It’s complicated how this cascades into the harms we’re seeing. But I guess that’s why we’re having these conversations. Right? I know that you both have to go. Thank you so much for making the time to talk to me about this. I really look forward to continuing the conversation. And anybody out there who listened, thanks for listening. And, let us know what you think. This is an ongoing process. We’re going to try to make the digital world a better place.

It’s only going to happen because we’re communicating and having conversations, and that doesn’t necessarily happen in, you know, little, 30s, scatterbrained, attention seeking videos. It happens in longer form conversations like this and frankly, even much longer dialogues than the hour that we’ve got to spend together. So I really appreciate you taking the time. I appreciate everybody out there who’s listening.

And, anything either of you want to say further?

Olivia Carville

From my perspective, I just think that you hit the nail on the head there. The most important thing is that we’re talking about this, that we’re raising awareness of this fight and that people understand where we’re at. Because for so long now, I feel like no one really fully understood the impact that technology was having on children.

And we recently saw that neuroscientist testify before Congress about how our generation Z is the first generation in modern history that has underperformed their parents on every cognitive level from memory, numeracy, literacy. And you know what changed with generation Z? That’s the introduction of the smartphone. The introduction of social media. And I think we need to fully understand the impact that these platforms and technology are having on kids because, as Cody mentioned, a short time ago, technology is outpacing regulation.

The laws and the litigation cannot keep up with just how fast technology is moving. And we haven’t even touched on generative AI or chat bots or anything like that in this conversation, because it’s all going so fast and we’re all scrambling to keep up. And I think, unfortunately, parents are left in a really impossible position where they’re trying to protect their children who are begging for smartphones, begging for access to social media from the age of ten years old.

And they don’t really know the best way to go about it. So conversations like this can at least help parents understand what the monsters are and understand what they’re comfortable with. Their children, you know, being given access to and when. So I feel like this is just one step in the right direction.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Great. Thanks, Olivia. Cody, anything else?

Cody Venzke

I’m thankful that we’re having this conversation. You know, we brought in a number of views about Section 230, about speech online, about kids in the relationship to technology. But in the privacy space, we all have this sort of surveillance fatalism. I’m already being surveilled. They already know everything. Why should I even try? We’re here trying. We’re having this conversation and that is the most important step.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

All right, Cody, Olivia, thank you so much and all of you. Thanks again.

Olivia Carville

Thanks, Joe.

Cody Venzke

Thanks, Joe.

This is going to have a huge impact on so many fronts like jobs, the environment, or our collective ability to think and communicate. But it’s especially urgent when it comes to our kids. I met a bunch of great people there at Utah’s beautiful Capitol building, including Utah Representative Doug Fiefia, Attorney General Derek Brown, Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell and Majority Leader Kirk Cullimore. The good news is the bill passed unanimously in the committee, and will now head on to the House and the Senate. Let’s go 👏👏👏🇺🇸 🔴

[TRANSCRIPT]

This is the Utah State Capitol, and I just testified before the state legislature about the AI Public Safety and Child Protection Transparency Act.

Hey, everybody. Good afternoon. Thanks so much for having me here.

I’m excited to be talking here about this bill. Like the representative said, my name is Joe. I work in film and TV. I also founded and ran a media tech startup. And this year, I’ll be directing a movie for Netflix that I co-wrote about AI. So in doing the research for writing this movie, I’ve had a chance to speak to a lot of the people that are at the forefront of this technology. I’ve talked to people that are inside the biggest AI companies. I’ve talked to people in government, in academia, in nonprofits, and I’ve learned a lot. For one thing, I agree with Silicon Valley that this technology is a really big deal. I believe that it could eventually impact all of our lives.

It’s very powerful already, but it’s getting more and more powerful all the time. And look, a lot of that impact is going to be great. I think that AI has potential to boost productivity and help our economy and advance science and medicine. But like with any powerful technology, it can help and it can harm. It can be both. It’s all about how we use it, right?

So the question is, what are the principles, what are the morals that are guiding the development and the design of this technology? And I’ll tell you, from what I’ve learned, To me, there’s only one principle at play right now. It’s making money. That’s it. And look, I’ve run a business. It is clear as day that is. Spin, it’s PR, it’s marketing. Because again, these companies are driven by only that one guiding principle, making money. That’s it. So this is why the AI industry needs laws. The federal government hasn’t done anything about this yet, but thank goodness the states are stepping up. I was actually here in Utah just a couple months ago for the AI Summit that Governor Cox put on along with his excellent team of very smart people that are working on this.

Utah, as far as I understand, has been a leader in the past protecting kids against these predatory tech companies. And now I think it’s time for Utah to be that leader again. So ladies and gentlemen of this committee, again, thank you for having me, and I am asking you as a tech enthusiast and as a businessman and as a fellow American and as a dad, please do the right thing and pass this bill.

Thank you.

DANIEL: Oh my god, you’re bringing up Swiss Army Man? You know this year is the 10-year anniversary of its release.

JOE: No, it’s not. Really?

DANIEL: Sundance, next week. Yeah, 10 years. It’s kind of crazy.

JOE: I’m going to Sundance. It’s going to be the 20th anniversary of Mysterious Skin. I got a 10-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 3-year-old. All right, so it was probably like six months ago, seven, eight months ago, you started talking to me about this idea for what has become the Creators Coalition on AI. And we’re having this conversation right now because we made the announcement. What was it, late December?

DANIEL: Late December, yeah.

JOE: Yeah, we were gonna launch a little later.

DANIEL: Yeah.

JOE: And now we’re flying the plane as we build it—

DANIEL: I think that’s the only way to do anything these days.

JOE: It merited a response. So we announced just towards the end of last year, and we wanted to have a follow-up. And, you know, there’s been like a lot of really lovely positive encouragement and support for the Coalition. A lot of people have signed their names, and then there’s been a lot of questions. So we thought we would just kind of record a conversation where we answer a bunch of these questions.

DANIEL: Yeah, it’s really important to us. I think transparency is one of the hardest things to be fighting for right now when it comes to conversations around the tech industry. And it only feels right that if we’re gonna be fighting for transparency, we should also be modeling it. And so we at the CCAI—I’d like to believe that these conversations—we should be having a lot of conversations. Like, right now the problem in Hollywood is that a lot of conversations are happening in secret and behind closed doors. Yeah, and everyone is kind of having these narrow conversations in isolation. And I believe that we’re not going to be able to move fast enough if that’s the way we do this, because obviously this is very scary. There’s a lot of potential risks. There’s a lot at stake. And I wanted to create CCAI with a bunch of other like-minded people, specifically to create a space where we could have these hard conversations between a spectrum of different voices and a spectrum of different experiences. Because if we’re only having these conversations in two places, and those two places are either behind closed doors or online—you know, where, even with the best intentions to have a nuanced conversation online, it’s going to get swirled up by the algorithm and then chewed up and polarized. And I knew that this conversation was too important to risk that kind of outcome.

JOE: So yeah, and frankly, that kind of polarization only plays to the advantage of the predators. Yeah, frankly, because I think there’s a divide-and-conquer strategy. They want us to not be talking—

DANIEL: Or to be fighting the whole time.

JOE: And that’s fighting amongst each other.

DANIEL: Yeah, fighting each other instead of fighting the people who actually have the power and the control over how this technology is being deployed. Which, most of—you know, if anyone’s been following my journey into the AI world—I believe that the way that this technology is being deployed is completely wrong, and we really need to be pushing back on it. And I believe there is a better way. We just need to work together to make that happen.

JOE: Yeah, and I agree with you. And at the same time, I’d like to maintain some kind of optimism, because I think the technology itself has the potential to be great. But the way it’s being—especially turned into businesses nowadays—is leading us down some potentially really dark paths. And that’s why we have—I think we have the time now. Now is the time. If we can have these conversations, we can hopefully do some course correction and be like, let’s take this technology that could be incredible but is currently being leveraged in an ultimately damaging and power-concentrating way. Yes. But if we can course-correct, maybe it could be something that genuinely is good for everybody.

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to talk more about that kind of dichotomy. Like, you know, we spend so much time talking about the risks, it’s really hard to talk about the benefits. And I think that’s for good reason, because—this is a bit of a crude analogy, but I’ve been using it recently and it’s been helpful in conversation. When you’re in a relationship with someone and the other person suddenly wants to invite a third in, like a throuple, you know, a threesome, right?

JOE: Polyamory.

DANIEL: Polyamory, or just a one-night thing, who knows. If your core relationship is not one that has foundational trust and ideas around consent, ideas around a shared understanding of what you guys are stepping into, bringing in a third is incredibly—it’s chaotic and dangerous. And no one—

JOE: I was so tempted to ask if you’re speaking from experience, but I’ll skip that.

DANIEL: But you don’t want to talk about the fun stuff, right? Unless you feel—unless you have some trust. And our industry is trying to talk about the fun stuff. We’re trying to talk about the positive, we’re trying to talk about all the benefits this could have. But we haven’t even established basic rules of trust and consent. And until we have that safe conversation, I don’t blame people for their knee-jerk reaction to be like, hell no, I don’t even want to hear about the positives. So I just want to acknowledge that I do believe that there are positives, but there’s so much work that we collectively need to do together to make each other feel safe before I feel like, all right, let’s do that. Yeah. This is me, personally.

JOE: Yeah, which is why probably almost all—most of the time I’m raising my hand or making a video about AI, yeah, it is more about the concerns. Yeah. But yeah, it is important not to get too completely pessimistic. Ultimately, if you want to head in a positive direction, you’ve got to have your eye on that too. But do you want to talk a bit about what we’ve done so far, what the announcement said, just for those that maybe hadn’t seen the announcement a month ago?

DANIEL: Yeah, amazing. So we’ve spent the last, you know, six or seven months—a group of us, filmmakers from all different areas of the industry. We have actors, producers, writers, but we also have VFX artists, we have voice actors, we have people from tech-adjacent spaces who understand the technology but are very critical of how big tech is implementing it.

JOE: I’d also add there’s quite a few people who have shown a lot of enthusiasm who are not in the Hollywood film and TV world, because I think that this is just as important, if not more so, on YouTube, for example, or in the podcasting space, etc., etc.

DANIEL: Exactly. Because of how decentralized this problem is and how widely distributed this technology is, to only have a conversation about Hollywood would be foolish. And so we’ve also been intent on inviting in and having conversations with online creators and things like that. But the initial impulse was to bring everyone together on the same page because my—one of my fears is we continue on the default path.

JOE: Yeah.

DANIEL: If we don’t coordinate. The path of least resistance looks something like this, because we’ve seen this happen and play out in other industries. We’ve seen it happen in our own industry. It’s one in which the tech industry comes out with a new shiny toy, and there are a lot of really exciting, interesting things about it. They deploy it onto an industry, and it disrupts things, right? It’s the “move fast, break things” model. And at first, the relationship’s really wonderful and exciting. I remember when Uber first came out, I was like, oh my gosh, so affordable, so convenient. This is amazing. But what ends up happening is the disruption of the model really breaks some fundamental things, like protections, the ethical concerns around any of these technologies, in a way that allows the tech industry to consolidate a lot of power and a lot of control. They hold all the cards. Once they capture a large enough market share, no one else can compete. And then once that happens, they dictate the rules. They set the terms.

JOE: And Uber is now high-priced, whereas when they first started, they had these low prices to get everybody hooked.

DANIEL: Exactly. It’s high-priced for the user, low wages for the driver. And on top of that, the drivers—if you look at the taxi industry, that used to be an incredibly strong, powerful job. The labor protections around that were really powerful, and the requirements to get into that field were really high. You had really incredible drivers who knew how to do their job. Now—and this is no offense to any Uber drivers—but some of you are terrible at driving. Some of you, like, it’s stop-and-start, it’s stop-and-start. It’s like, the number of times I feel like—

JOE: And the drivers are really poorly treated—

DANIEL: Exactly.

JOE: I was in an Uber the other day, driving from the airport, and it cost, I think, something like $90-something to get to my house from the airport. And the Uber driver said to me, “What is it charging you?” I said, “It’s $90.” He said, “You know, I’m getting $30.” That’s crazy. Doing that whole drive, and he’s only getting a third of the money.

DANIEL: So they’re being mistreated. We’re getting a worse service, and we’re paying more, and a lot of it’s getting siphoned up to the tech companies. And this has happened with Spotify and musicians. You can see what happened with Airbnb and housing. Even when you look at streaming—like, obviously it’s a very complex thing that happened to us—but when we chased after what the rest of the tech companies were doing within our industry, we accidentally created a streaming bubble that devalued our product, our stories, in a way that changed the relationship our audiences had with the theatrical experience, which suddenly made some of our business model no longer make sense. And so now we’re struggling after that pop, in a way where less productions are happening in the U.S. Budgets have really gone up into places where it’s really hard now for people to make movies and for audiences to come and actually support them. And so, my—the default path—this is a long-winded way to say the default path is one in which the tech industry sets the terms for our industry, and suddenly the creators are no longer at the table and no longer have any power or any agency within our careers and within our industry.

JOE: But the truth is that these tech companies need the creativity of humans. Their products don’t work. Their generative AI services don’t generate anything at all without all the content and data that they have taken from human creators.

DANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. And what’s really interesting about this situation is we’re in this rare moment where I believe, no matter who you are within our industry, there are aligned goals and aligned values that we could actually gather around and fight for. And even though our industry is normally divided between the labor and the studios—and that’s a very important part of our industry, the ways in which we negotiate between those two parties—we’re in this unique situation where if the unions are only negotiating against the studios, that will solve a lot of really important problems. But the bigger problem is how the tech industry is releasing this technology, not just to our industry, but to the rest of the world.

JOE: Yeah. That’s why I like using the word “creators” for this Creators Coalition, because whether you’re a creator in the sense that you’re an individual artist, or you are a union like the Screen Actors Guild or the Writers Guild of America, or you’re even a studio—or perhaps, and I think honestly maybe even most importantly, you’re a creator that’s not affiliated with the traditional Hollywood film and TV industry. You’re making your—you’re doing your thing in the larger digital creator economy right now. We’re all facing a common problem.

DANIEL: Exactly. And so with the Creators Coalition, my hope—and my aim, and all of our founding members’ aim—is to find a way to bring together the like-minded people who are the filmmakers and the crew members and the agencies and the executives and the people who are working at the studios, really waking up and realizing we actually collectively need to ensure that we are the ones setting the terms for our industry and not allowing the tech industry to do that for us. That being said, we’re also going to extend even further. Our cohort and our community will also have to extend out to the tech people who also want to be doing this right, because that’s something that’s really important to acknowledge: the tech industry is not a monolith. There are obviously a lot of terrible incentives and a lot of really big corporations that are doing a lot of things that I believe are damaging to our world. But there are so many people who work within tech—many people who I know personally—who desperately want the work that they do to matter and to be done right. And they are also looking at what’s happening with the tech industry in horror. And so our strange, nuanced, coordinated effort to reach out to all these different kinds of parties across many different dividing lines, to me, is where we will find strength. And the important thing I always try to tell people is, right now we have to realize that the dividing line isn’t between the labor and the studios. It’s not between the film industry and the tech industry. The dividing line is between those who want to move fast and break things or those who want to slow down and actually get this right. And so that’s sort of, you know, to address one of the—

JOE: Can I interject on that? Slow down and get things right? This is what we do when we talk every week. Like, I don’t necessarily agree with everything you say, you know. Necessarily. I usually bristle at the idea of slowing down, because to me there’s this false dichotomy. You get these Silicon Valley VCs who will call themselves accelerationists and say we have to go fast, we have to go fast, and all these anti-tech people just want us to slow down. I think we can go fast. We should go fast. The question is, which way are we going? Can we also steer while we go fast? Can we steer towards good solutions? We have to be building, not stopping building. We’re building good, pro-human, pro-society solutions, and that requires going fast, not necessarily—I mean, you could say slowing down, let’s take stock, let’s be careful, let’s be thoughtful in how we do this. But I don’t think the right answer is, like, let’s just stop.

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

JOE: I don’t know how that actually works in the room—

DANIEL: Yeah. And we can—I think we can break down all the reasons why right now a full-on stop isn’t viable and actually could hurt a lot of things.

JOE: That’s one of the questions I want to get to. Maybe before we—because that was one of the kind of frequently asked questions I want to answer in this conversation. Before we do, there’s two things I feel like we should cover before we get into the questions. One is, what are we gonna do about it? We, meaning not just you and me, but this coalition. Where, you know, it started with a core group, grew into a bigger group. Now there’s many thousands of people who have signed their name to it. What can actually be done?

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s a great question. I just want to circle back and put an underline on one thing that you said, because I think it’s important. The fact that you and I are disagreeing right now—yeah—is so important, because that is why the Creators Coalition is important. We want to create a hub where we can have these really hard conversations with nuance. And so when people look at our roster and they see a kind of bizarre spectrum of bedfellows, that is the core of what we’re trying to do. Because I believe that the disagreement is where you will find—it’s a lot more difficult, obviously, but it’s going to be the way that we actually—you know, if there is one way to get this right, and I don’t think there is one way, but if we are going to ever be able to get this right, it’s going to be through a lot of hard conversations and disagreements on our way to finding alignment. So, I’ll just say that.

JOE: And some compromises.

DANIEL: So many compromises.

JOE: Not that this is democratic exactly, but it’s not—you know, even though I would say that you sort of started this, you’ve always been really specific in saying, yeah, but I’m not the director, the dictator, the CEO. Let’s do this in an open and collaborative way. And even though I joined early, I don’t want to see it as, well, that means that my opinion matters more. The way that you’ve always talked about it, and I really agree with doing this, is sort of, yeah, this kind of open-source, open, collaborative, pluralistic, cooperative way.

DANIEL: Exactly. So it involves disagreements.

JOE: So it involves disagreements. And compromises. Okay, so to that question, the question of what can we actually do? What do we think this coalition is gonna do next?

DANIEL: Yeah. So the strategy is constantly evolving, just because it has to be. It’s constantly evolving. The more conversations we have with different parties and different people and different perspectives—we like to listen. It’s very important that we’re listening, and it causes things to evolve. But right now, the general framework is, first, step one: we have to unite and use our collective power. And that goes beyond just the unions. We have to do unions, agencies, studios, content creators, YouTubers, beyond Hollywood.

JOE: Everybody who makes things.

DANIEL: Because even though we are very different and we have very different jobs and very different wants and needs, we have a lot of common overlap around what this technology is going to do to us now and also in the future. And so number one: unite. Number two: we’re going to have to build. And what I mean by that is, this technology is fundamentally incompatible with our current systems and institutions. Like, all the laws and the rules around how our business model works—this technology has the potential to break a lot of it.

JOE: And all those rules were put in place before this technology existed, and this technology is so new that those rules don’t necessarily make sense.

DANIEL: Exactly. And so we have to really rebuild and transform a lot of these systems in a way that can actually hold this technology and bind the technology so that we can responsibly use this technology. Meaning, how do we mitigate the worst risks? How do we really—and there’s a long list of things that we need to do for that to happen. But also, how do we get the benefits out of it? And I do believe there are benefits worth discussing. Even if you’re someone who absolutely hates AI, it’s worth noting that we’ve been using versions of AI since Lord of the Rings, or even before, with crowd simulation and stuff like that. So, building—

JOE: Yeah. Not just saying, hey, here’s a bunch of problems, but let’s try to build some solutions.

DANIEL: Build some solutions together. Because—and on our terms, not on the tech industry’s terms. On our terms. How do we build them on our terms? Okay. So: unite. Build. Third is, once we’ve built a system that shows us what is the right way to do it and what’s the wrong way to do it, we need to be fighting back against those who aren’t going to do it the right way. And I believe that there is a version of this where we can use our collective power to litigate through lawsuits, use legislation, especially on a state level. If you think about California—Silicon Valley and Hollywood—we could be really using that lever.

JOE: And then there need to be laws.

DANIEL: There has to be laws.

There’s no laws.

JOE: There’s no laws! There’s laws for every industry. There’s more laws, they say, in how you make a sandwich or sell a sandwich, exactly, than how this world-changing technology—

DANIEL: Exactly. And I believe we are going to be able to do that better if we’re doing it together. And the last thing is, we need public pressure. We need to—because I believe that this technology, specifically Gen AI, for video, for audio, for text, it’s already shown how dangerous it is. The fact that the same technology that they’re pitching to us as a tool for creativity and unlocking our imaginations is also being used by bad actors to completely alter reality through deepfakes. Right? Like, this affects everyone. And I believe that if the government’s not going to regulate Gen AI in that way, someone has to. And I believe Hollywood—we still have some leverage, and we still have some influence, and we would love to be the tip of the spear to lead the rest of society against the ways in which the tech companies have decided to deploy this. So public pressure, bringing people outside—anyone outside of our industry who is deeply concerned—to come join us and push back together.

JOE: So that’s all part of fight. We had number one, unite; number two, build; three, fight—fight through litigation, legislation, and public pressure.

DANIEL: Exactly. And number four is, this is not just happening to Hollywood, and we believe that we need to be connecting with other industries, and we need to be in some ways learning from what the teachers are doing in their industry, learning from what the doctors are doing. And on the flip side, Hollywood can be a model to other industries as well, to show them how to unite, build, and fight.

JOE: I remember the first time you talked about this, you bringing up that point, and that was really what made me say, oh, you know what? I really do want to team up and get involved in this. Because as much as I deeply care about movies and art and creativity—and I do, it’s not only how I earn my living my whole life, it’s something that I just am deeply passionate about—it’s, you know, the life of an artist is something that means more to me than maybe is even rational. But there is something much bigger going on here than film and TV. And if we’re gonna be spending all this time and effort trying to work to build new, better systems and fight back against the path of least resistance, to me, it’s got to be about more than just movies and television shows. It’s about the way the whole world is about to unfold over the next X number of years.

DANIEL: One hundred percent. Because the tech industry has so much consolidated money and power and influence at this moment, I believe that if the teachers are pushing back at the same time that the truck drivers and the filmmakers and the doctors—if all of us are collectively uniting, building, and fighting together at the same time, it’s going to be really—it’s going to be really hard for the tech industry to ignore us.

JOE: That’s our best shot of a bright—if we’re all doing it together.

DANIEL: Exactly. Especially because right now—this is just some extra added context—you know, for many different reasons right now, we can’t rely on federal government, because we are locked in a geopolitical global arms race between the corporations and the nations to reach AI supremacy. Which is something that needs to be repeated often, because it feels like we are in an arms race that is incentivizing these companies to deploy as fast as possible.

JOE: I mean, this is a tangent, but I think the geopolitical arms race is a bit of sleight of hand. I think it’s more of an excuse to just let businesses make money and consolidate power.

DANIEL: Exactly. And so the problem is, right now, because we can’t rely necessarily on the federal government—I do believe that collectively, if we are doing this kind of coalition building across many industries, we actually have a shot of pressuring not just the tech companies, but eventually maybe the governments. And then also, if you’re in Singapore or Australia or Indonesia, it doesn’t really matter. We should all be kind of pressuring the people at the top to find a way for us to push back against the arms race, find a way for global coordination to maybe actually happen. Yeah. Huge tangent. Sorry. Let’s answer some questions. Okay. I would love to ask you the first question. Okay. So this is a question we’ve been getting a lot, and it’s totally fair. Is this just a bunch of A-listers who are trying to protect themselves? Like, how is the CCAI dealing with the fact that this is impacting crew members and people below the line and just so many people who—yeah, who don’t have the platform that, you know, you do—

JOE: And people that don’t work in Hollywood. Yeah. I completely understand this. Here we are making this video. An actor that’s been in successful movies, and you’re a filmmaker that’s made a bunch of successful movies, and it could very well seem like we’re trying to be gatekeepers. Yeah. And I really understand, especially from the point of view of someone who wants to make movies who has no access to Hollywood. Yeah. Say you’re just like two young people with no money to speak of. These tools could potentially give you the power to make movies that look as high-budget and high-production value as The Avengers or whatever else. I want that. I want that to happen. And I root for that. I, you know, believe it or not, as much as I feel so lucky to have gotten to be on some of those big sets making those big movies, I’m a hundred percent rooting for the two kids out there who can make the next huge blockbuster movie. We want that. But I also do think that unless we establish proper principles of how these tools can be used, how the economic upside of these tools flows, even those two kids that made the crazy blockbuster with no budget using these tools, they’re gonna get taken advantage of too. They’re next—we’ll all get taken advantage of. There will be no human creator spared if we don’t stand up for these principles. So I think it’s actually really good that we’ve been getting these questions. I think it’s really important that this group, this coalition, that frankly did start with some Hollywood-established people, not be Hollywood preservationists.

DANIEL: A hundred percent.

JOE: And, you know, we talk about that in our discussions. And to me, I’ve been reaching out to various people I know who work outside of Hollywood, who are working on YouTube or working on other platforms, and I really think those perspectives are important. And let’s be honest, Hollywood has not been an unequivocal good for society. You know, I consider myself very lucky to have gotten to work in Hollywood, and I think that the Hollywood film and TV industry has yielded some great art. There’s been really great things for the world. But let’s be honest, it’s also yielded a bunch of crap and a bunch of bad influence. And it is exclusive and cliquish, and it’s hard to get into the Hollywood industry. And I don’t think we should be trying to preserve every single thing about the Hollywood industry. We want, ultimately, to get towards a future that is more open and that is more empowering to more and more creative people. And I do think this technology could be a part of that. But if we go down the path of least resistance, that’s not what’s gonna happen. Yeah. What’s gonna happen is not a diffusion of power. What’s gonna happen is a further concentration of power, where all the power goes into the hands of just like four or five of the biggest AI companies.

DANIEL: Yeah. One way I’ve heard someone say is like, “democratization.” Like, they were democratizing this tool, right? This tool is democratizing how filmmaking is made. But democratization without distribution of the power and the wealth and the money is basically making it so that no one, except for a very few people, are gonna be able to have viable jobs where you can make a living and, you know, take care of your family. In the same way that when Uber took over the taxi industry, a lot of people moved away from the taxis, where they had proper labor protections, into the Uber ecosystem, where there’s very little or no protections.

JOE: And—has that been good for the drivers?

DANIEL: It hasn’t been good for the drivers. Exactly. So what could happen with us is, if we just allow—you know, again, this is not about gatekeeping, but if anyone and everyone is just using this technology without first establishing these rules, I believe more and more work is going to be leaving our industry. And the unfortunate thing about that is, one of the things I do want to protect about our industry is we have very strong labor protections. We have some of the best guilds and unions in the country. And we want to be able to—I would love to preserve a world in which working creators and creatives and crew members could actually make a living and could support a family. In a world in which we just allow this “democratizing” tool to be released everywhere without proper safeguards could mean the collapse of a lot of that protection and a lot of the strength that we have when we’re actually coordinated together.

JOE: The taxi industry is an interesting analogy, because it’s also worth acknowledging that the taxi industry was protectionist. It was sort of exclusive. There was corruption. There were problems with the taxi industry that deserved to be fixed and disrupted. And do we have a better situation now with Uber? I actually think that’s debatable. I don’t think it’s a hundred percent clear that the world was better before Uber, but I do think it’s clear that Uber is unfair and exploitative and there should be more protections for the people who drive Ubers. And if that means that Uber has to eat into its revenue and stock price a little bit so that it can pay fair, living wages to the people who drive the cars, well, so be it. And that’s actually what laws are for. And the tech industry does have a history—and Uber is an example of that—of getting around those kinds of guardrails that have been put in place to protect the more vulnerable and less powerful people of society. That’s what the labor movement was, you know, back before the New Deal, during the climb of the Industrial Revolution. There was no such thing as labor laws. And big businesses could put workers in really unsafe conditions, and they could work them past an eight-hour day, and they could—you know, there needed to be, ultimately, a labor movement of people coming together and saying, “Hey, we’re not gonna let you just take advantage of us one by one. We’re all gonna get together, and as a unit, negotiate for a fair workday and safe conditions and no child labor.” And those are good things. We want to keep that. And it does feel like in this day and age, in Silicon Valley, there’s sort of this libertarian bent that’s like, “No, there should be no curbing of business. Businesses should just be able to do whatever they can get away with.” And that’s not a world we want.

DANIEL: Yeah. I mean, it’s very apt. The last time we had a technological industrial revolution, we had to rise up and recreate our world and rebuild all of this stuff. And to your point of Hollywood is a flawed system—you know, I’m very lucky that I also work in this industry. But I do believe that AI is forcing a conversation on—and AI, mixed with all the other things that we’re dealing with, like, you know, studio mergers and the fact that all work is leaving the country—there’s so many things right now that’s forcing the industry to have a bit of a soul-searching conversation about who we want to be and what we want to transform into. And I—that’s actually, to me, one of the beautiful things. Like, how can we protect the things we love about this industry but also do away with a lot of the other problems? And I believe AI is part of what’s forcing those conversations. And to kind of wrap up this answer—this kind of answer of, are we just A-listers protecting ourselves?—it’s why it’s really important that one of the first things the coalition has done is actually, we brought together leadership from all the guilds and unions into one room so that we could actually be discussing these things. And so we have the DGA, the WGA, SAG, IATSE, Teamsters, Producers United.

JOE: And those unions don’t just represent the A-listers, quote-unquote.

DANIEL: No. Ninety percent of those bodies are everyday people. In fact, a lot of blue-collar, working-class, middle-class people who are just trying to make a living. And even on our founding board, we have people who represent that side of the conversation as well—the people who are really scared about what this technology could do to their job, right? And so I know obviously having them in the room doesn’t necessarily guarantee that things are going to go well, but the one thing that really gives me some confidence in what we’re doing is that, individually, the people—all the people that I’ve been talking to through the process of building this coalition—all have big hearts, and they’re dedicating a decent chunk of their life and time for free to ensure that this doesn’t go down the default path. And so having people like us, but then also having people who are VFX artists or voice actors, you know, people who are usually overlooked and neglected in these conversations—they’re actively sitting next to us in these conversations.

JOE: And one thing—I’m repeating myself a little bit, but I think it bears repeating—that I do think we need to do better at, and we really will, is not only having those folks that are less visible, like you’re talking about, in our industry, but people outside of the Hollywood film and TV industry. Because the digital creator economy is—let’s face it—it’s bigger and more important than the Hollywood film and TV industry—

DANIEL: Yeah. I mean, and that’s also why you’re such an interesting person to be a part of this, is because you have such a rich history with that group through HitRecord and things like that. That’s part of your origin story as well. And so having you on the team speaking for those people has been really—I think it’s all—it’s all important. It’s essential.

JOE: But I would say anybody out there watching this who is a digital creator, yeah, who doesn’t work in Hollywood, who has thoughts about this, who thinks that you can bring a perspective that we ought to be exposed to—like, come. Let’s get involved, and let’s have that conversation.

DANIEL: Awesome. Next question.

JOE: All right, I’ll ask you one. Let’s see. Okay. Right. So another thing we’ve heard from a different contingent of people is, how can you be in any way accepting this technology? Are you endorsing this technology? Are you just allowing the big corporations to use this technology? Why aren’t you just advocating for a full-on ban of this technology?

DANIEL: Yeah. That’s such an important thing to discuss, and it requires sort of a longer discussion. Let’s see how much I can get through here. Because in some ways, I’m someone who doesn’t want to be using this technology. Like, you know, I know there are people in our group who are using it, some people who are excited to use it. I’d say 99% of applications, I’m like, I don’t know if I need it. But I’m still here having these conversations, and I’m still here pushing, because the reality is the technology is already here. And even if you think it doesn’t work and it’s never going to be viable for our industry, one of the things that I’m really worried about is the fact that the technology doesn’t actually have to be that good for it to do a lot of damage. Is McDonald’s food that good? I mean, I mean, objectively, I don’t—I love McDonald’s. I shouldn’t be talking about—yeah, but—

JOE: That sweet and sour sauce?

DANIEL: Exactly. But objectively, is it good?It’s—it’s—I don’t even know what it’s made of half the time. But did it take over the world? Yes. Did it fundamentally change our relationship with food as a country? Of course. The leading causes of death are heart disease and obesity. Not only that, but the industrialization of food has caused untold damage to our climate and to our planet. And so it doesn’t actually have to be good. The technology—like Gen AI—doesn’t have to be able to compete with Oppenheimer. Right? It just has to be good enough for the general public when it’s free and easy to access. What is that going to do to everything? I’m worried about that.

JOE: Can I interject for a second? Because I do feel like it’s an important point of clarification. When we talk about art and creativity and AI, it’s the difference between good or great art versus content that can move numbers. Yes. That’s very important. And I think it’s a philosophical and highly debatable question of whether AI will ever make great art. But will it generate content that moves numbers? Probably more effectively than any human. Yeah. I think it already kind of can. And soon, because it’s getting better and better and better, it will absolutely destroy any human in the ability to move numbers. And what that means is, if you’re a business, if you’re YouTube or you’re Netflix, and you’re thinking, hmm, I could either pay a human to try to achieve my business goals, or I could employ this technology to achieve my business goals. Well, it makes a lot more business sense to use the machine that can move more numbers.

DANIEL: Exactly.

JOE: And of course, the lie is that the thing moves numbers without humans. Yeah. Because the truth is that the thing can’t do anything without its training data, which was stolen without consent or compensation.

DANIEL: Exactly. But I bring that up because a lot of people think, “Okay, we’re in a bubble, or the technology is not good. Why do we even use it?” If we believe that if we just demand an outright ban, that this thing will go away. And while I am worried about all the same things that anyone who’s asking for a full-on ban is worried about—I believe in the same things, I cherish the same things, I want to protect the same things—but I believe that we are going in a different direction. You know, I’ve spent the last three years in this field. My team has talked to countless people in and outside of the industry.

JOE: The documentary is so great.

DANIEL: Our documentary is coming out at Sundance next week. It’s called The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. I was just a producer on this doc. We had a great team. But even if we’re in a bubble and it bursts, the market valuation will drop, but the capabilities are still gonna be here. Just like when the internet—the dot-com bubble burst—the Internet still came back and took over everything, and we all saw how that went. Yeah. And to me, even if I’m wrong, I would rather be able to know that we are working towards something, just in case—building a version of our industry and our world that can actually give people an option to use this the right way. Because whenever I talk to anyone within this space—labor activists who’ve been doing this for a while—you always want to find a way to reward the good actors and penalize the bad actors. Right now, we don’t have a way to delineate between those two things. And so, to me, full-on bans never work on any technology. It’s just like—over and over again, you have to find a way to give people the safe option, right? You have to give people the right option. Otherwise, everything’s gonna go underground, and people will just do it in this unregulated space or whatever. And so I believe that, unfortunately, it is here. Even if the technology never gets any better than it is right now, it’s enough to be effective. And asking for a full-on ban will get you laughed out of the rooms when you’re trying to talk to the people who are actually navigating this space.

JOE: Yeah. You’re kind of placing yourself on the sidelines.

DANIEL: You’re putting yourself on the sidelines. And so, to me, I’m trying to keep—for this one little moment of time, I have some influence and some ability to open some doors—I’m trying to keep that door open as long as I can to bring in the voice actors and the VFX artists and the animators into that room, so that when the people who are normally making these decisions about how this technology is used, they will have some sort of voice and some sort of seat at the table. And so, while I don’t believe a full-on ban on Gen AI is ever going to happen, there’s so many ways in which we can have nuanced conversations to build a better version of this. Yeah. Do you have any other color to add to that?

JOE: No.

DANIEL: All right. So, you know, we throw this word—ethically—you know, standards of ethics around AI. What is your benchmark for ethically used AI? What does that even mean?

JOE: It’s a complicated question, and there’s probably not a simple answer. And part of what I think we need to build is a complicated and multi-pronged answer to that question, to provide what are all the criteria that count as ethically sourced. But I will talk about one thing that, to me, I talk about a lot, and is what I would put at the top of the list. And it has to do with this sort of sleight of hand, this magic trick, that the AI companies have pulled with what they call artificial intelligence. Because the name “artificial intelligence” makes it sound like, “Oh, artificially it can make things, it can write things, it can make videos.” But it can’t. Generative AI doesn’t generate anything on its own. The way these products are built is that the tech companies take enormous amounts of content and personal data from people. They take every video on YouTube, they take every book ever written, they take every article on the web, they take every song ever put out, they take every movie ever made. They take everything—home videos, your birthday pictures, your vacation photos.

DANIEL: It’s like everything.

JOE: Yeah. Take everything. And they feed that into an algorithm that then turns it into data they call tokens. And then it calculates the statistical relationship between those tokens. And it can generate these pretty incredible outputs. Yeah. But those outputs are impossible without all the human inputs. Yeah. And right now, the AI companies are taking the position that they can just take all of those human inputs without permission, without compensation, without controls, without transparency. And so, to me, this is one of the main frameworks we have to get right in order to establish an ethical AI model. When—and I’m not saying don’t use the technology. I’m just saying, how is it going to work? When the AI company generates an output, there should be consent, there should be compensation, there should be some controls. You should be able to say, all right, no, I—”You know what? You can’t use my video that I put up on YouTube. “Or, “Yeah, you can use my video, and here’s my price.” Yeah. Or, “Here’s my video, and here’s my price, but you can’t use it for anything pornographic or anything political.” You should—people should have control. And then a sort of market dynamic can emerge where the AI companies are needing to pay and compete for human content and data. And to me, this could set us up for a bright future where there is still economic reward for human creativity. And I don’t mean economic reward like just big Hollywood hotshots are getting paid huge amounts of money. I mean anybody that has a good idea about anything, whether it’s in entertainment or journalism or academia, science, medicine, whatever. Right now, the AI companies are gunning for a future where any good human idea is allowed to be taken, monetized without permission, without compensation. And where does that lead? If you take that a few steps down the road, that leads to a world—and they say this out loud, they say it—they say, “Our models are going to do all of the economically valuable work. The whole GDP, or something very close to it, is going to flow through our company.” That is their explicit goal. And that is totalitarianism. That is us going back to a world where a few kings and warlords own everything, and everybody else are just serfs working on the king’s land. You know, that’s not—it’s not only unjust, it’s not even good if you’re a business person. Even if you’re not a bleeding-heart liberal like me, even if you’re like a full-on “let’s have a strong economy” person, it’s not good for a strong economy. Empowering a diffuse economy where people can make money, that’s what makes a strong economy. That’s why, historically, the United States became the economic superpower that it did, because back in 1770-blah-blah-blah, we said, “Nah, we’re independent from the king. We’re gonna have ownership amongst the people.” And of course, it didn’t happen overnight. And at first, it was only ownership by white men. And eventually, that had to, over time, change. And it didn’t happen fast enough, and it still hasn’t happened all the way. And these things take way the fuck too long. But we have to get it moving in that direction, because right now we’re moving back towards a kingdom where the digital world is a kingdom run by like four or five kings of these big AI companies. And it gets dark, to me. To answer your question, “What’s your version of ethical AI?” It would be an AI model that offers consent, compensation, controls, and transparency to all the people whose content and data is being used.

DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, I got so much to say about that. I want to answer this question of ethics. But I do think a follow-up question that people talk about when—because you’re talking about inputs, right? You’re talking about training data on the input side. How do we make sure that people are fairly compensated? A question that a lot of people—you know, I speak to people at different guilds and different organizations who are worried—is, how do we ensure a world in which, even if we fight for compensation on inputs and outputs, just copyright in general, how do we ensure that the people who are benefiting aren’t just the copyright holders? Right? Because the copyright holders are the businessmen more often than not. Even most of my copyrights are owned by studios.

JOE: The movies I worked on, too. It is different when you’re an actor because you own your face, your likeness. Yeah. So you get likeness.

DANIEL: And what happens to the cinematographers, the costume designers, the gaffers, anyone who is working on these things that contribute? Because hundreds and hundreds of people contribute to every single film. How do we ensure that that is actually, you know, fairly distributed? This is an open-ended question, but I ask the question because I know this is something you care about and think about when you’re talking about things like data dignity.

JOE: Yeah, it’s true. And again, there’s not a simple answer, and it goes to the need for upgraded systems. Because the truth is that all of us who agreed to work on movies and give up any ownership of the copyright of that movie, we all entered into those agreements before this technology existed. We never contemplated that when we were signing these contracts, the fact that we signed the contract would be used against us so that our work could be fed into an algorithm and put us out of a job. And so, to me, there probably should be some kind of legislation. And again, this goes way beyond the movie industry. What about doctors who spend their career working in medicine and generating all these medical records? They don’t have any ownership of those medical records. And then those medical records are gonna be fed into an algorithm to put them out of a job. Like, this is gonna happen in so many different industries, and we need to somehow get ahead of it and acknowledge that this technology is new. There’s never been anything like it. And copyright is old. And there are certain principles, I think, that copyright stands for, and we can continue to stand up for those principles, but the details of how it works have to be revamped in light of this incredible, revolutionary new technology.

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. I say all of this to kind of ensure to the people watching this who are concerned about this—this is one of the things I’m really worried about, and we’ve had a lot of discussions about it. There’s so many different ways in which we can be advocating for the right way to settle this copyright issue. Yeah. But it is going to require conversations outside of our industry as well, because we are fundamentally changing the way we think about copyright and ownership and IP, all these things.

JOE: I want to add just one more example. Because you bring up a really good point about how the movie industry works. What about YouTube? Currently, if you upload a video to YouTube, you’ve agreed to some kind of contract that lets Google, who owns YouTube and also owns Google DeepMind, their AI company, use your video to train Veo 3, their video generation product, or Nana Banana, their photo generation product, etc. And is that how that ought to work? I actually see YouTube as maybe one of the most fertile grounds for a potential good solution, because YouTube has a clear line to pay. They have all the different creators. And YouTube, actually, much more than any other platform, I think, strikes a pretty fair deal with their creators. They take the ad revenue, they split it in half. Half of it goes to YouTube, and half of it goes to all the different creators whose work is being monetized through their ad model. And half sounds pretty fair. So I feel like—and Google also is such a big company—they could potentially invent the new technology and the new systems necessary to be like, cool, if we use your YouTube video to train one of our AI models, and every time one of those AI models produces a piece of content that makes money, it can trace back to whose video was used and in what importance, how important any given video was in any given output. And we are going to assign some of that ad money to all the different people whose content was used to train this model. It’s not an easy thing to accomplish. But if anybody can accomplish it, maybe Google and YouTube can accomplish it. And I would love to see that happen.

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. There’s so much to say here. But I would love to answer this question of, what does ethical use even look like? Because, to me, one of the things that I repeat often—and I think I’m annoying about it, but I think you just got to be a little annoying sometimes—my fear is that the default path, this sort of path of least resistance that I’m talking about, is the one in which we solve the copyright problem. Because I believe that is going to happen. I believe that even if CCAI didn’t exist, a version of the copyright problem would be solved.

JOE: Yeah.

DANIEL: And it would be solved by the—yeah—the CEOs and the stakeholders and the people who actually care about this stuff because it’s gonna affect the bottom line. I believe that’s gonna happen. And then suddenly, everyone’s gonna be like, well, we did it. Ethical. We figured it out. And then a lot of that energy and leverage and power will suddenly dissipate. Which is why what I’m trying to do is—I’m trying to sneak in, and it’s not even sneaking. It’s like, full-throated, just like, this is—we have to be worrying about jobs at the same time, right? Jobs, guardrails against deepfakes and the misuse, and all these things, as well as, how do we make sure that in the face of industrialization of creativity that we’re protecting the thing that makes us most human, which is our imagination, our creativity, and our ability to tell stories at large? Which is, in some ways, an overreach. It’s too much of a scope. I admit, this is too much for us to be holding. But I fear that if we do not try to do it all at once, that the things that matter most to me are going to fall to the wayside. And so, protecting—when I say jobs, it’s about job protection, figuring out which jobs we can protect and how do we protect them, not only for the livelihood of the people who are working right now, but for the training and the continuing of our craft and the artisan traditions that we have developed over the last hundred years. Right? Protecting just that part of it. But then also, sadly, we have to admit that even without AI, our industry is shrinking, right? And jobs are going away, and jobs are going overseas. How—is there a version in which—actually, there’s two things I want to say about jobs here. First of all, if the AI companies are gleefully talking about how they are building this to replace the economic worth of workers, it’s on them to make sure that our workers are taken care of, right? We should be figuring out—with some sort of automation tax, some sort of way in which we can be building transition funds, retraining funds—how can we take the people most vulnerable within our industry and make sure that, no matter what, we can take care of them, whether that means protecting them and making sure that they stay, or finding ways in which we can retrain them or find other directions for them to go in? And this is, again, a conversation that every industry is going to have to have.

JOE: Everything you said, other than maybe one thing, which is that it’s on them. Because I don’t think they can—there’s—they’re for-profit businesses, and they—well, it’s not in their DNA.

DANIEL: So, it’s on us to force them to contribute.

JOE: Yes. We have to get the government—there has to be—exactly. We have to be fighting for this.

DANIEL: We have to be pushing for it. And they cannot just wipe their hands clean of it. Yeah. So, to me, that’s really important. And that, to me, is something I’m worried that’s going to fall to the wayside, because people are just like, well, this is what happens, right? It’s like, no, this is very different. And it’s happening at a speed and scale—it’s very different when it comes to the misuse of this technology for deepfakes. Again, I don’t believe anyone else is going to step in and fight for this. I believe that we have a little bit of power, and we should be pushing back. And every business person should be worried that no one knows what’s real anymore, right? No one knows what’s real. How is a society going to function if a society can’t function? How are you gonna do business? It just—to me, it feels like this is the kind of thing that should be a no-brainer. But I think we’re also paralyzed. No one really knows what to do. And then the last thing, again, is protecting our humanity. I just want to make sure that as we are using this technology, we have the wisdom to know when to use it and when to not use it. Because there are certain use cases of gen AI where I think, for the most part, 99% of the ways we would use it would be bad for society and bad for humanity. I look at what’s happening with all this automated, generated slop that is just flooding everything. And it’s gotten to a point where people don’t even recognize it as AI all the time. Like, 50% maybe. And by next year, it’s gonna be completely unrecognizable. There are certain use cases of this technology that I think we need to be saying no to, so we can protect, as a greater society, our communal—just our communal story, the myth that we collectively hold together when we tell stories with each other and communicate and dream together. All these things—we are what we eat, right? We are what we eat. And if the last 10 years has taught us anything, we are also what we see and what we read and what we hear. And I personally believe that—again, this is a much larger conversation—we need to be building new systems and new institutions and new ways to look at imagination and creativity as a muscle. Just like our government has all these programs for fitness and health, we need to be doing that for our mental and creative health as well, pushing back against the easy path.

JOE: Exactly.

DANIEL: Now do we push back against the atrophying of the mind? How do we push back against all these things? To me, if we can find a way to build metrics for all of these things and push back against the tech industry’s desire to release this technology without first addressing those things, then there might be a way in which some AI use will be ethical and potentially even beneficial.

JOE: There’s a part of this that is deeper than any transaction. And I love it when you go here, because I’ve been in rooms with you where we’re talking brass tacks with business people. And sometimes business people don’t want to talk about the philosophy. They don’t want to talk about the stuff that you can’t quantify in numbers. But that is a part of this coalition. It goes beyond any lawsuit or legislation or anything with a right angle. It’s something that I feel, and I know you feel, and I bet a lot of other people feel. It’s, as you said, part of what makes us human, part of what gives us a soul. And it gives us kind of the sanctity of what it means to be alive: storytelling. And I don’t mean storytelling like a movie or a show or a product or a commodity. And this is, by the way, one of the things I think Hollywood is just as guilty of as Silicon Valley, is turning this sacred human thing into a commodity, into purely a business. And Hollywood did that way before Silicon Valley ever did it. And I do feel like part of this coalition is just having some communion and sort of recognizing fellow humans who care about this, who also feel this, that this is about more than dollars and cents or views and likes or any business or anything like that. This is about something deeper, something that we all share as fellow people.

DANIEL: Yeah. What you’re getting at is, one of the benefits of AI right now is the fact that it’s forcing us to look in the mirror, right? What does it mean to be a human? Exactly. And what you’re saying about the film industry failing our audiences—I believe that in some ways, we’ve hit a point where you could say that about almost every industry, right? The education industry—is education failing a lot of kids? Yes, right now it is. Is the medical field just prioritizing profit over—exactly. And then you look at even religion. What have many religions within our country become? They’ve become businesses. Over and over again, people are realizing that our institutions are failing us or whatever. And the way that AI is going to supercharge and speed up all of those trajectories is forcing us to go back to first principles and ask ourselves, what does it mean to educate? Yeah. What does it mean to tell a story? What does it mean to heal someone or have a church? Or have a church? Oh yeah, exactly. What does it mean to have a spiritual community and spiritual personal walk with whatever you believe in? You know, it’s not just—and so much of what drives me when I’m working with people like you and the rest of the coalition are these questions. Because in my heart of hearts, if I can be really gooey for a little bit, I really dream of a world in which, by facing down these problems and these risks that our industry is facing, we will be forced to reckon with some of these questions. And some of us—I’m not saying all of us, no, not everyone’s going to want to do this—but some of us are going to really want to stand up and transform what it means to be a storyteller and become good stewards of the craft and the responsibility that it is to be a storyteller. I believe that—like I said, we are what we see, we are what we watch, we are what we—all these things. And stories do have a profound impact on the way that individuals and communities move through the world. I believe that now that it’s become so accessible through this technology—it’s become so accessible, anyone can technically tell stories—it’s really shown me, and hopefully shown a lot of other people, how much responsibility should be going into this. Like, what is our Hippocratic oath as storytellers? I—it sounds like it could be kind of flippant, or obviously it’s very different saving people’s physical lives versus telling stories. But I do believe that, me as a storyteller, I would like to ask that question for myself. What is my responsibility to my audience? What is my responsibility to my community and to society? What’s my responsibility to my crew? You know, I do believe that some in Hollywood are soul-searching. And I’m just really hoping that a lot of people like ourselves can be in those conversations to help point towards other options and other directions, other paths for what our industry could be and what our craft could be. Yeah. Well, that felt good.

JOE: Yeah. Get some of that stuff—we got three more hours, four more hours.

DANIEL: We could keep going. All right, so a question we get—because we have the four pillars, right? We’re talking about copyright, jobs, guardrails, and protecting humanity. A lot of people are wondering, why is environmental impact not something that is on that list?

JOE: Yeah. It’s certainly a huge deal. I mean, I’ve been paying attention to climate change since the ‘90s, or since I was a young kid able to pay attention to what was going on in the world. And certainly, the impact of building these data centers and just the massive amount of construction, everything that’s going into building up this AI industry, is having an impact on the environment. I’m a dad. I care very much that the climate stay healthy and safe for human beings moving into the future. But you do see some things online about, for example, how much water gets used every time you query a chatbot. That’s—I think that’s just factually wrong. So I do think that we should be clear-eyed about how we talk about AI and the environment. But that’s not to say it’s not important. I do think it’s incredibly important. So, I don’t know. I’ll turn that question to you. When we debated whether or not to include that in our four areas—the environment is one of the things I care about most in my life.

DANIEL: Honestly, I’ve become pretty avid—just someone who just loves ecology and loves nature and just someone who really wants to be protecting the earth. I will say that the environment is an issue. And even if it’s less than agriculture and beef and farming and that kind of stuff, it is still really important. And my fear is, like, around scaling. Like, as this scales up, it will potentially become worse. And so the thing that we need to be wary of is, as the Creators Coalition, with limited time, money, resources, and energy, how do we make sure that we are in our lane, dealing with the things that are our domain, our expertise? Yeah. Meanwhile, like I said, that fourth point of our strategy is connecting with other places. There are so many incredible organizations that have already started around advocating for and against AI use and the environmental impacts of AI use. And so there is a world in which, later down the line, we find a way to pull together some of these organizations to help us understand and figure out how this works within our industry. But in the short term, we need to focus on what we actually believe is our—yeah, our strength and what is our responsibility right now. That being said, eventually, as the Creators Coalition continues this conversation, it’s still on the table. It’s still on the table how we deal with environment and resource management and resource allocation, all these things, when it comes to AI use. Because I’m gonna say something a little controversial, maybe—or not controversial, but something that might need to be unpacked. In the vein of talking about how Hollywood isn’t a perfect system, Hollywood can be very wasteful. There’s a lot of bloat. There’s a lot of resources—we build up these amazing buildings and then just take them down and destroy them or burn them or, you know, whatever. There are specific use cases of gen AI that would actually be better for the environment than what we do, if I’m being very honest. And also, I do believe that we should be fighting for other ways to use gen AI. Because right now, everyone’s talking about generalized large language models, and those require a lot of resources and massive data centers. And I think it’s incredibly problematic. And right now, there’s a lot of communities around the country and around the world who are pushing back and winning—like, actually blocking data centers, which is amazing. We should continue doing that. I believe that the future is actually small language models and these sort of bespoke—there are ways in which you can create really task-specific, not generalized, models to do very specific things that are far less resource-intense, that can just get the job done in a way that—again, it’s very specific, very nuanced, but it’s worth saying that that is a possibility and something we should be considering when we talk about environment and AI. It cuts both ways in an interesting way. But yeah, to sum it up, we care deeply about the environment. We believe that this is something worth fighting for. We do not know if it’s within the current scope of our bandwidth and also within our expertise. That being said, we are in conversation with organizations who are concerned about the intersection of AI and environment. And those are always going to be the kinds of relationships and partnerships we’re going to be continuing to foster and grow and, hopefully, yeah, take that information to our industry. Okay.

JOE: So some people asked about how some of the people on our founders list own or invest or work on AI companies. Yeah. And asked, is that not a conflict of interest?

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Look, it’s gonna get messy when you try to build a broad coalition, knowing that the more plurality of voices is going to only benefit you when you are trying to fill in blind spots, especially when it comes to something as nuanced and complicated as this. And so we actually felt like it was important to be working with people who are actively working with this technology and trying to build the technology, as long as those people share the same values. And that’s the thing that makes me feel really proud of the work that the coalition is doing. Everyone I work with, whether they are crew members or people who actually work with AI companies—these specific AI companies—these are the people who are actively pushing for the protections of the things that we care about. The reason why some of these people have even started companies was because they were worried about how the bigger tech companies and bigger AI labs were building and deploying this. And you’re talking about Natasha and Paul, right?

JOE: Yeah, Stereo. Yeah.

DANIEL: Stereo. And Natasha and Paul—one of the first few conversations I had with both of them was about how concerned they were with how this technology was being built and deployed. And so that is why they decided to build this smaller company. And they are trying their best in the vacuum. And now we’re trying to pull them into this bigger conversation to see if there’s a way in which we can actually show and prove to the rest of the tech industry that there are ways in which you can do this properly. And so right now, Stereo has built—they’ve built foundational models that are completely built off of licensed materials. There are some drawbacks because that makes the technology slower and maybe not as good. Personally, and I think Joe agrees with this, we’re talking about building some sort of standard of ethics and creativity—fairness and fairness around AI. Again, we haven’t even set the standard, and we don’t know how to build those things. But one way we can do that faster is if we’re working with the people who care deeply about the same things we do but also understand how this stuff works.

JOE: Yeah. So if you—and again, it’s part of the coalition having a real wide variety, yeah, of perspectives and experiences. I think that’s probably the best way to get to a bright future. It’s not to have purity tests and exclude anybody except the people who we perfectly, a hundred percent agree with. Yeah. But rather, it’s a coalition. Let’s build a really broad coalition on this stuff.

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that goes back to one of the first things we said, which is we cannot allow this conversation to become polarized and broken up. And you used the term “purity test.” I feel like the last 10 years has shown us what happens when you close off all these doors. We lose power. We lose collective leverage when we aren’t willing to see that everything is going to be some version of compromise. Yeah. But how do you ensure that the foundational values are still going to be fought for and still protected? And any conversation I have with these people who work with AI companies always starts with, how can we make sure that the VFX artists and the animators and all these people are protected? And how do we ensure that these tools are actually used as tools, not as replacement? And that, to me, is—yeah, that, to me, feels like the reason why it feels important that those voices are included in the coalition as well.

JOE: Yeah. Well said. What can people do next right now?

DANIEL: Yeah. First up, if people want to learn more, follow along, be supportive, sign up on the website, add your name to the list, be part of this growing number. Because that can be huge power when we move into rooms and need to be talking. It’s really great to have these names to point to. And I know there’s a lot of names on that list that are big, renowned names.

JOE: You might see that list and be like, uh, my name doesn’t belong on that list. No, but we want the coalition to be a really broad and wide variety of people. Everybody’s name belongs on that list.

DANIEL: Yeah. So that’s first up. Second up is, we are a volunteer-run organization. Everyone who does anything is doing it for free. We are looking—right now we’re looking for an executive director, and we’re looking for funds through fundraising. And that’s gonna be great. But for right now, we are all volunteers, and we need people who are passionate and excited. And if you think you have a very specific skill set or a very specific point of view, feel free to reach out, and we will try to—we’re still working out our process, but we are trying to find ways to find more people to help, because there’s a lot to do. This is a many-tentacled creature that we’re trying to tackle. So there’s a lot to work on. And then the last thing is that we are looking for more clarity and more information. And so, because we want to be making informed decisions, we are going to be looking for opportunities to have discussions, to poll our community, to really get a picture, a temperature check of what people believe. What are you afraid of? What versions of AI are you excited about? All these things. So look out for those opportunities, because we would love to hear from people, your feelings. Because the more we hear, the more we learn, and I think the better our decisions can be. Yeah.

JOE: Yeah. Excellent. Thanks for doing this with you.

DANIEL: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, one last thing. Last thing that you can be doing right now is just have conversations. Have conversations with your co-workers, with your family, with the people around you, the other creators in your community. Have hard conversations, honest conversations. Build safe spaces where you can be honest. Because I think the moment it becomes divisive, the moment it becomes a fight, that’s when we make the worst decisions, because that’s when we’re working from an emotional standpoint, not from a place where we can actually—yeah, work together to find proper solutions. Debate can be healthy. It doesn’t have to be a fight.

JOE: Yeah, exactly. And so having those conversations right now and developing within yourself the sort of language for how to talk about this and your own personal feelings on what is responsible, what is ethical, what standards there should be—if you know that, and you can communicate that, then we’re gonna have a better—we’re gonna have an easier job collectively doing that together, right?

DANIEL: All right.

JOE: Yeah, man. Man. There’s so much more to say. Thank you, Joe.

DANIEL: This is awesome.

JOE: Well, let’s—we’ll see all the comments.

DANIEL: Okay. We won’t do this again.

🔴

TODD: Joe, thanks for coming here today and participating.Really great to have you. So let me just start off by saying, I mean, observing that you’ve been a student of an observer and an active participant in the intersection of media and technology for more than two decades.

JOE: True enough, yeah.

TODD: So you’ve started this thing called HitRecord in the mid-2000s, which, by the way, just to level set, that’s when YouTube… First, you know, put up my day at the zoo. Um, so tell us just a little bit about HitRecord. What was the original vision for that? It’s now part of another company, but you know, how have things panned out on that?

JOE: So HitRecord started as just this hobby that I was doing together with my brother, and it grew into an online community of people making art and media together. It eventually became this VC-backed media tech startup, and eventually we had our exit into masterclass, like you’re just talking about. And nowadays, I use the name HitRecord for the work I’m doing developing film and TV and digital content, mostly around trying to spread helpful messages about the future of technology and humanity. But I actually feel like I learned so much from all the different ways that HitRecord took shape over the years.

And it’s a big part of why I’m here today, having a conversation like this. Because running HitRecord, I learned not only about the technology itself, but the business of technology and how that industry works. And a lot of the stuff that I’ve been raising my hand about with regards to AI lately, it’s not necessarily so much about the tech itself. I’m actually really optimistic and excited about the technology. But the business incentives driving some of the biggest AI companies, I think could be leading us down a pretty dark path.

And if we talk about it and we understand it, I don’t think we have to go down that dark path. I think there’s still time to go down something much brighter and you know, HitRecord to me has always been kind of fundamentally optimistic. It does connect back to my brother who I started it with. If you ever got to spend time with him, he’s like a deeply positive and caring person,

which is probably part of why I can’t give up the goofy name HitRecord because, you know, it always makes me think of him.

TODD: Well, we talked a little bit about it, and when the internet first came out, I’m old enough to remember that, and I was like, oh, the future is so bright, everybody’s going to seek truth and goodness, and that’s not what happened.

JOE: Well, yeah. I was as optimistic as anybody during the rise of social media. That’s what HitRecord came from. And look, so much good stuff happened and continues to happen on social media, but we, you know, what did happen is a few, a small handful of these kind of gigantic walled gardens came to dominate what was the Internet and their advertising business model necessitated these algorithms, these engagement optimization algorithms.

And I think it’s those algorithms, frankly, that are causing so many of the damaging side effects that we’ve seen from social media, whether it’s mental health or the backsliding of democracy.

And we’re about to see that all happen again with AI, but worse because there’s so much more compute power now and so much more money at stake.

TODD: Yeah. So what needs to happen? I know, you know, we talked earlier, industries are regulated. There are laws. You know, you drive over a bridge, you take it for granted that. You know, somebody is going to be liable if the bridge falls down.

JOE: That law was built to code as defined in the law. That’s right.

TODD: And you can’t sell a car that goes a thousand miles an hour and drive it on the street.

JOE: Every major industry has laws except the tech industry.

TODD: Is there, I mean, what do we need here?Do we need the political will to do this?

JOE: Well, just really recently, Australia, I don’t know if you know, enacted this landmark legislation banning social media apps for Australians under 16. Someone just clapped in there, yeah. And, you know, I’m a dad. I have a 10 and 8 and a 3-year-old. And we’re not anti-tech with our kids. They actually use computers a fair amount for cool things that don’t have engagement optimization algorithms built into them.

TODD: But you’re in favor of the nanny state. I’m just kidding.

JOE: There you go. Well, Elon, no, that’s actually not what I’m in favor of. This is the question, right? It’s like, well, and I understand why people kind of don’t trust governments to make laws that regulate technology. But look, that’s… Your bridge example is actually a really good example.

TODD: Well, it was your example.

JOE: Well, from earlier. They didn’t know that. But we take for granted a lot of how there’s an interplay between industry and government. And that’s how our society works. And there have to be some laws, some guardrails.

TODD: Now, one of the things you’ve talked about extensively is that AI, again, it’s neither good nor evil. It just is. One of the things that needs to happen is that the creators from which it draws its source material need to be compensated. How close are we to getting that? And what are the obstacles to getting there?

JOE: Yeah, it’s a really important principle to me as an artist and a creator, but I think it’s actually important far beyond the entertainment industry or art or creativity. I think for the very viability of a whole economy. The basic principle that when a person has an idea or does some work that an AI company shouldn’t be allowed to just take what they did, put it in their AI model, make money with it, and not pay the person. That doesn’t make sense.

And it’s important to know a little bit about how these models are built because it’s not always obvious. In fact, the name itself, artificial intelligence, sort of implies that like, oh, oh, well, just there’s this artificial intelligence and it just does these things by itself, but it doesn’t. That’s not how the models work. The way these large language models are built is they take every book ever written, every movie ever made, every article on Wikipedia, probably every article on variety, every video on YouTube, everything that all these humans have put their, their time and energy and labor and perspective and skill and talent into, and they take it without permission.

They take it without compensation. And now they’re generating trillions of dollars of economic value. And that’s not going to work. So one thing I think is really important is that all of us, whether we’re an individual creator or a company, whether it’s film and TV or music or journalism or whatever else, we all kind of stand for this principle that moving forward,

AI companies are going to need to offer consent and compensation for the data and we all kind of stand for this principle that moving forward, AI companies are going to need to offer consent and compensation for the data and content they use to train their models.

TODD: Well, we’ve seen, you know, so Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal, they have started a legal defense. They sued several companies. They said, hey, your thing says type in Darth Vader and it spits out Darth Vader. That’s clear copyright infringement. What are your thoughts about that? And then, so then just last month, Disney did this open AI deal. Where they’re licensing 200 plus characters to their sort of video generator company. And you’re going to be able to make Mickey Mouse say, hopefully, brand safe things. But what do you make of all that? I mean, what are the Hollywood, traditional Hollywood companies, what’s their play here? And, you know, what is the play forward?

JOE: I mean, the first thing I would say is I appreciate the Disney leadership saying that they want to protect creators. We’ll see how much that wish comes true. But I would broaden it out beyond this deal between Disney and OpenAI. Like I just said a second ago, almost all of these large language models are built on mass theft. So I would hope that any deal done with one of these AI companies doesn’t forgive that past theft. Because I would imagine that probably any deal from one of these companies includes a clause. That says you release us from any claims for all of your stuff that we stole over the last number of years. That’s something I think we all kind of need to get on the same page and agree. No, let’s not forgive that past theft.

Because whether it takes a year or five years or more, eventually we are going to arrive at the conclusion that this principle is important. that people deserve to be paid for their work. And at that time, we’re going to go back and we’re going to get recourse for all the stuff that was stolen.

TODD: Okay, let’s shift gears. We’re going to talk about AI, but you’re directing a movie for Netflix.

Yes, yes. About AI. About AI. Some people, when we made the announcement, were like, you’re making a movie out of AI. And I was like, no, it’s about AI.

TODD: Are you using AI in any way in this production?

JOE: It’s a really complicated question because AI is a poorly defined term.

TODD: Yeah, does it mean spell check?

JOE: Yeah, exactly. Right. So what I don’t want to do is the thing I just said, where using these tools that are built on mass theft, I don’t want to do that.

TODD: So Rachel McAdams starring in this?

JOE: Rachel McAdams is starring in it.

TODD: Not a likeness of Rachel McAdams.

JOE: Exactly. Yeah, let’s hear it for Rachel McAdams. Thanks. She deserves it.

TODD: The movie doesn’t have a title yet, but can you tell us anything about what the plot is?

JOE: I shouldn’t tell you the plot. It’s about these themes. And my dear old friends, Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman, are producing it. And I’m so, so happy that it’s at Netflix. It’s really the ideal place because… It’s the biggest audience in the world, and this is a movie that I want the whole world to see and be talking about.

TODD: By the way, what do you think about Netflix’s deal to buy Warner Brothers and HBO Max? Is that good for creators?

JOE: It’s a really good question. I’ll say one thing. I love going to the cinema. There’s nothing like going to the cinema. There’s nothing like people gathering in the same time and space and sharing a story together. It’s a big part of what makes us human, I believe. And hopefully, I hope against hope that that will keep happening. The truth is I don’t think that any one company has the power to make that happen or not make that happen. And I also – we were talking about regulation earlier. I don’t think there should be a law saying that people have to watch movies in the cinema. Ultimately, this is going to be a decision for people. Like if people keep going to movies, then – the movie theaters will stay open. And if people stop going to movies, then they won’t. And that’s really just a kind of a cultural choice that we all have to make. And if it’s been a while since you’ve been to a movie, out at night or in the day, you know. With other people who you don’t know. And you can feel them there. There’s something about that social experience. And like I said, there’s nothing like it. So go. Go out to the movie.

TODD: So is your movie for Netflix going to run in theater?

JOE: I hope so. I don’t think they decide that.

TODD: Did you talk to them about that? Did you say, I’m not going to make this unless you put it in?

JOE: I think they decide that later in the process. They’ll see. I don’t know what they’re going to do. I hope they put it out in theaters.

TODD: Shifting back, I was asking about AI misconceptions. What do people in the industry, what does the general public not fully appreciate about AI? Because generative AI really is a step change technology. It’s not just like from silent movies to talkies, although some people thought that was a pretty seismic shift.

JOE: So one of the maybe the chief misconceptions about this technology that I like to

point out is that it’s not a person. It’s talked about like a person, and it generates outputs that use words like I and me. When you type a prompt into a chatbot, it’ll say, oh, let me think about that. I think you’ve got a good idea, and I’m going to make a – there is no I. There is no me there. It’s not a person.

TODD: It’s robots.

JOE: It’s an algorithmically statistically calculated set of outputs that are just the average of its inputs.

TODD: The lowest common denominator of whatever you’re asking.

JOE: It’s technically average. It’s exactly what it is.

TODD: So that can’t produce something great.

JOE: Well, what’s great there. You get into the philosophy. Like some people really love movies and bands that I don’t think are great. And I love things that other people don’t think are great. So that’s really subjective. To me, one of the most important parts of the sort of anthropomorphization of these models gets back to what we were talking about a second ago with intellectual property. Because the argument that’s often made by these AI companies,

and this is an argument that was echoed by Donald Trump and many others. They say, well, no, the AI models are just like a person. who has influences, takes inspiration from things, and makes something new. And if a human author reads a bunch of books, you can’t expect them to pay all the other authors of all the books.

TODD: Like George R. R. Martin drew on Norse mythology and whatnot.

JOE: Of course, exactly. But that argument hinges on the equivalency of a large language model and a person. And this is something we’re going to see more and more that these AI companies are going to say our models should be treated as people should be treated with

protection under the law should be given civil rights. Of course they want that because that just makes their company more and more powerful.

There was a lawsuit. There’s a bit of a tangent. There was a lawsuit against one of the companies. because a teenager who was using the chatbot a lot committed suicide. And they tried to claim that the model should be protected under free speech. A large language model doesn’t need to be protected under free speech. Just like a large language model, it’s not the same as a person. And a large language model that ingests every book ever written in a matter of months and calculates the statistical averages is not doing the same thing as a human author who takes inspiration from the books that they love. They’re not the same thing.

TODD: So for your AI movie, where did you draw the inspiration? And you co-wrote the movie.

JOE: I actually just put a prompt into one of those chatbots, and it made the whole thing for me.

TODD: But without maybe being able to tell us exactly what it’s about, you’re going to have a perspective here on AI and its influence and impact on humanity.

JOE: This is a thriller.

TODD: So it’s entertainment. It’s not homework.

JOE: Yeah. And look, what makes any good thriller is stakes. And as I hope you could tell from this conversation, I really believe there’s a lot at stake with how this technology unfolds over the next number of years. And yeah, certainly the position that I’ve been in, the privileged sort of access I’ve had to the tech industry and community has been really informative for me in how I’ve been able to co-write this movie. And I think you all are going to find it really intriguing and highly entertaining.

TODD: We had Anthony Wood, CEO of Roku, on an earlier panel. He said in the next three years or so, there will be a 100% AI-generated hit movie coming out. What does that say to you? And is that depressing? Or is that just the way that things are going?

JOE: The depressing part would be if that hit movie makes a bunch of money and none of the people whose content and creativity and humanity went into it. The training of these models that generated the movie share any of that economic upside. That would be depressing. Is there also something philosophically depressing about an algorithm that can make a hit movie? Maybe, but frankly, I’ve never been as motivated by it. What do you call a hit? Is a hit just something that does good numbers?

TODD: Made its money back.

JOE: So, I mean, like, if you’re motivated by numbers as an artist, you’re setting yourself up for depression. Because if you want to really take joy from art, you need to dig deeper than that. You need to acknowledge that there’s something about art that transcends the transactional numbers.

TODD: I think that’s defensible, especially in this room. In the time we have left, let me ask you, which side of the camera do you like being on? You’ve been in a number of movies.

Inception, by the way.

JOE: Heard of that one.

TODD: Is in front or behind the camera? What’s your poison?

JOE: I love all that. I feel really lucky I don’t have to choose. This next movie is going to be the first time I direct a big thing that I’m not acting in, which I’m really, really excited about because I’ll get to just relax so easy. You don’t have to be busy acting.

TODD: Hang out at the virtual craft. Joe, thanks a lot. Any last thoughts here about what we’re going to see in the year ahead, either from you or the industry? What are some of the big trends to watch?

JOE: I think it’s really good that we’re having these conversations, and we all need to get on the same page. There’s definitely a strategy of divide and conquer in place that’s coming from the tech industry who, I’m sorry, but make no mistake… The way that these companies think about their businesses, the strategy that they have is we are going to subsume not just the entertainment industry, all the industries. That’s how they talk about it. They say we’re going to,

and they use words like super intelligence and AGI and things like we’re going to, our models are going to do all of the economically valuable work.

That’s what they say. So we all have to get on the same page and saying like, look, it’s great if the models are so useful, but let’s acknowledge where the value is coming from. Yes, the technology you built is awesome, but also it’s trained on a lot of labor and humanity and blood, sweat, and tears from all these people. So let’s build a world where this technology doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It could be a great thing if we set up the systems so that it can actually benefit everybody.

TODD: Joe, you should run for office.

JOE: Thanks.

TODD: Thank you very much.

Just before the holiday break, I had the honor of speaking before the General Assembly of the United Nations. I was there for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) which they hold every year to discuss how digital technology, the Internet, social media, and now of course, AI, can be a good thing for the 8 some billion people alive today.

The other day, I posted a video of my speech, and it’s been heart-warming to see so much encouragement and support from you all out there. At the same time, there were a number of folks in the comments who expressed a real disappointment and even distrust for the United Nations as an institution.

I’m certainly not going to sit here and say that the UN is without flaws—even perhaps deep flaws. I’m sure there are many very valid reasons to harbor negative feelings towards the UN.

But at its core, this is a place where people from all over the globe come together with the shared goals of world peace and universal human rights. It’s kind of a miracle that such a place even exists. And is it surprising that it hasn’t succeeded yet? At achieving world peace and universal human rights? Could you pick any two harder things to achieve? And shouldn’t we keep trying anyway?

Perhaps optimism is naive, but perhaps it’s just the opposite. Perhaps pessimism and cynicism are for dupes—for swallowers of the divisive stories peddled by the bullies and war-lords who don’t want international law, who don’t want a global community, who would prefer we all play every-man-for-himself because that’s how tyranny wins. It’s when we all unite—that’s when we stand a chance. Is the United Nations doing a perfect or even a good job? That’s debatable. But do we have any other better shot at sincere global unity? I don’t think so.

I found it deeply moving to walk the halls of the UN headquarters in New York City. I met a lot of people there, and I really did sense a pervasive and genuine care for humanity—especially for the most vulnerable amongst us.

To be clear, I don’t fault anyone for expressing negative feelings towards the UN. That’s what democracy looks like. It’s messy. It moves slowly. Often it’s two steps forward and one step back. But it’s the least bad version of cooperation we have.

Thanks to everyone who commented. I look forward to continuing this slow, messy conversation with all of you 🔴

🔴

Madam President of the General Assembly, Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen — Thanks so much for having me here at the United Nations for the World Summit on the Information Society. I want to acknowledge the co-facilitators of this year’s summit, Kenya and Albania, as well as the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

This is a special milestone summit marking 20 years since the UN first adopted a set of shared principles for a human-centric digital world. And certainly, a lot has happened in the digital world these last 20 years.

We saw the rise of social media, which in a lot of ways really made good on the promise of what the Internet could be — a place where anybody’s voice could be heard, and anybody looking for connection and belonging could find their community.

But then, as market pressures set in, we saw social media gradually change. What had been about connection became more about addiction. Addiction to an algorithmic feed maximizing user engagement and ad revenue. And the side effects of these profit-driven algorithms have been hugely damaging: a global crisis of mental health and loneliness especially for young people, a rise in polarization, extremism, authoritarianism, with the impacts often worst for people in developing countries.

So, looking back on the last 20 years, here’s my question: are we going to learn from our past mistakes? Because today, we find ourselves at a crossroads, with a new revolutionary technology on the rise — AI.

Just like with social media, AI has the potential to do so much good. But let’s be clear, today’s biggest AI companies are running the same engagement maximizing algorithms, driven by the same advertising business model as the biggest social media companies.

So if we let the design and deployment of this incredible new technology be guided solely by business incentives, we can expect the same damaging side effects we’ve seen from social media — though probably worse this time, because there’s a lot more compute power in use and a lot more money at stake.

But this is not inevitable. The AI revolution can be guided by more than just market forces. Governments need to get in the game. For the past 20 years, governments have mostly stayed hands-off with digital technology. We’ve let these businesses deploy their products to billions of people with practically no guardrails. It has not worked out well. But I think things are changing.

I just met with a gentleman here from the Australian government, and as you all know, Australia has just enacted landmark legislation standing up to big social media companies to protect their youth from these predatory algorithms. And now more and more countries are moving in that direction. Change is possible.

And I believe it’s you all, here in this room and all over the world, you civil servants — who serve civilization, not just the bottom line, you serve the people, you serve everybody, especially the most vulnerable amongst us. This is your time to step up, and work together with business and industry, to build a brighter future.

And so I just want to say: thank you. As a father of three kids, as a citizen of a democracy, and just as a human being… Thank you for everything you’re doing. Keep going. Your work is deeply appreciated. Thanks again. 🔴

This is not just gonna be artists, it’s gonna be all the hardworking and highly skilled people who work around them. And it’s not just gonna be Hollywood legacy media people, but also the YouTubers, the social media content creators, the podcasters, the newsletter writers, really all creators.

We’re all frankly facing the same threat, not from generative AI as a technology, but from the unethical business practices a lot of the big AI companies are guilty of, and look, I’ve said this before, I actually think the tech itself is super exciting, super inspiring, could mean a lot for the future of art and creativity in a really good way, but that won’t happen by itself.

If we take the path of least resistance, things could get really bad, and not just for creators and the entertainment and the media industry, but for so many industries that are going to be so heavily impacted or are already being heavily impacted by this technology.

So the idea is that through public pressure, through collective action, through potentially litigation and eventually legislation, creators actually have a lot of power if we come together.

And so look, this organization is new. We’ve been starting to work on it since the middle of this year. And today we’re just announcing our existence and we’re sort of building the plane as we fly it. But for now, come to our site.

The link’s down there somewhere (and here as well). Sign up, show your support. There’s going to be opportunities even for volunteering and stuff in the future. There’s much more to come. We built this for the long haul, but we’re here and we’re in the game. That’s the important thing for today.

Thanks. More soon. 🔴

So this is a sentiment that I saw written in the comments a fair amount in some videos I posted recently supporting legislation designed to help protect kids from predatory algorithms, AI chatbots.

And here’s the thing.

I agree.

I actually agree with this. I think parents should be stricter with their kids and their kids use of devices. I’ll caveat this by saying I’m a parent. I’ve been for 10 years.

I have a 10-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a three-year-old.

One of the things I’ve learned about parenting is don’t give advice about parenting unless someone has asked you for that advice. Because we all are different. Every family is unique. And I really try to respect every parent’s choices about how they choose to raise their kids. With that said, yeah.

I feel sad when I see little kids staring at their iPads. If you take it away, they cry, cry, cry like an addict cries when you take away whatever it is they’re addicted to. It does make me sad. And then there’s the other side, right?

The parent is just like sitting there scrolling on their phone and their kids right here trying to get their attention and the parent’s just not giving it to them. And let me be honest, I’ve probably been that parent before. I try my best not to be, I do my best not to bring my phone out around my kids, but I’m not perfect at it. Not at all.

Because parenting, it’s something you’re doing 24-7, 365. You can never be completely perfect all the time at anything. So we do our best, right?

We try not to give our kids too much of these addictive tech products. But sometimes... It does happen, right? That doesn’t excuse it. We should be trying to limit screen time, right? Or even the word screen time, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I actually think screen time is a bit of a red herring.

It’s not the screens that are the problems, I don’t think.

It’s these predatory addictive algorithms. Screens can be great. There are some education apps that are good. Most of them suck. I will say that. Almost every educational app I’ve seen, I’m like, this is garbage. But there are some good ones. Beast Academy is good enough for math, if you’re interested. The internet’s amazing. Wikipedia is amazing.YouTube can be amazing.

If i want to like, show my kid how much bigger would a megalodon be than a person — a megalodon is like an ancient shark, one of my kids was like really into prehistoric animals for a while — you can just like show them. That’s amazing. My parents couldn’t do that for me. So, I actually don’t think the devices, the screens are necessarily the problem. The problem are predatory, addictive algorithms.

An algorithm is a piece of math, really. It’s a piece of code. It’s a piece of logic that takes a billion different data points that one of these big platforms has, and it uses all that data to calculate what is the exact thing that needs to get served up to this user next to keep them hooked, give them that next shot of dopamine.

It’s a much more complicated and expensive version of a slot machine. The people in Silicon Valley literally study the same psychological science that casinos and slot machine makers study to keep the gamblers addicted. And we’re letting our kids have that. That’s the stuff that I think is the most important to keep kids off of. It’s the recommendation engines. It’s the For You feed. Probably anything where there are in-game purchases, these things are all algorithmically driven to hook your kid and prey on them and squeeze as much money out of them as possible, whether it’s money directly from you or it’s money from advertisers that are paying for your kid’s attention. We should be doing all we can as parents to keep our kids off those predatory addictive algorithms. And yet, can all of the responsibility, 100% of the responsibility be put on parents? Or does it make sense to maybe also have some laws? Let me ask you this.

Why do we have laws that you need to be 21 years old to buy cigarettes? Or 21 years old to buy alcohol? You also need to be 21 going to a casino. Why? Why? Couldn’t that just be the parent’s responsibility? When your kid’s little, you can control them more. They’re probably not gonna walk down the street and walk into a 7-Eleven and try to buy some cigarettes or try to buy a lottery ticket, right? They’re little. They’re not going anywhere that you don’t have your eyes on them. But then they get a bit bigger and they are curious about cigarettes or playing the lottery. Well, when they walk into that 7-Eleven, don’t you want the guy behind the counter to be like, let me see your ID?

Well, why does he do that?

Because it’s against the law to sell cigarettes to a minor. Those are laws. That’s the government getting involved, helping parents, helping parents. There’s some degree to which it makes sense for the government to help parents. So I don’t resent or even disagree with the folks who wrote comments like parents need to parent. We parents do need to parent, but both things can be true. We can take responsibility as parents and part of taking responsibility as parents can be raising our voice in a democracy and saying we collectively feel that it’s not okay that these big bad businesses are preying on our kids and we all want it to stop.

That’s what democracy is about.

That’s why I’m here making these videos, saying like, hey, here’s a good piece of legislation. Here’s a lawmaker that was brave enough to stand up to the million, hundreds of millions of dollars that the tech lobby is throwing against lawmakers who try to regulate them.

They’re willing to spend a lot of money to keep your kids hooked because they are making a lot of money off of your kids’ eyeballs. They’re going to fight us. And we need to fight them back. And at the same time, set boundaries at home. Uphold those boundaries.

Both things.

We need to do both.

Thanks for listening. 🔴

Background: The digital products and services marketed today as “Generative AI” do not generate anything on their own. They are “trained” on massive amounts of content and data produced by large numbers of people. And yet, many of the businesses selling these products and services do not get permission or offer compensation to all those people whose creations and personal information they are monetizing.

Why this matters: The economic impact of this arguably unethical business practice could be enormous. While authors, artists, journalists, and other content creators might feel the effect sooner, the same basic principle will eventually apply to innumerable fields: engineering, design, medicine, and so on. This revolutionary technology will only become increasingly ubiquitous, and if AI companies are allowed to continue monetizing people’s work without paying for it, ultimately the market will stop incentivizing any sort of human ingenuity. To lay the foundation for a new and upgraded AI-integrated economy, we need to build out a system that properly rewards people for the value they put in.

The controversy: AI companies today are arguing that their use of people’s content and data should be protected under the legal framework of Fair Use. Many authoritative voices disagree. Numerous lawsuits against these companies are underway, and various legislation has been proposed. Rather than diving into the debate, this document assumes that society will eventually arrive at the basic principle that people have an intrinsic right of remuneration for the value they generate in the digital world.

Solutions moving forward: Some argue that requiring AI companies to compensate people for their content and data would be too complicated. Various technologists, economists and others are working on this problem in great detail. However, this document aims for brevity and simplicity so we can all start looking at the same big picture and iterating on it together.

Four key criteria

Before an AI company is allowed to use anyone’s content or data to train an AI model, they should need to meet these four criteria:

1. Consent: Unless you specifically opt in, your content or data should not be used to train an AI model. Dominant platforms should not be allowed to punish users who choose not to opt in.

2. Controls: Once you opt in, you should be given a set of controls for how your content or data is used. For example, you might want to limit what type of outputs can be generated (like not using my stuff to generate pornography or political advertisements), what sorts of monetization are permissible, on what timeframe, etc.

3. Compensation: If your content or data is monetized, you deserve a portion of that money. Compensation should be on an ongoing basis, not with a one-and-done buy-out. People should be able to set their own prices for their own content and data, allowing a vibrant market dynamic to emerge. Guilds, groups, and coalitions should be accommodated to facilitate collective bargaining.
   

4. Transparency and Enforcement: AI companies will need to be transparent about all of this activity and submit to rigorous third-party audits to keep them honest. Rights enforcement agencies (like, for example, ASCAP) should be established. The penalties for violating rules should be substantially more costly than the extra expense of compliance.

Dividing up the money

Once people have given their consent and are receiving compensation, how would the money actually get divided up? This will be a complex challenge in terms of both technology and policy. But it’s do-able!

For example, YouTube pays roughly half of its ad revenue to millions of different creators, each according to the specific revenue their video earned. For this, YouTube enjoys a well-deserved positive reputation amongst creators compared to its competitors like TikTok or Instagram.

Here is a broad sketch of how a similar dynamic could work for GenAI.

• Payment per output: Compensation should be calculated each time an AI model generates a single output.
  

• Revenue per output: The system will need to determine precisely how much revenue is brought in by any given output.
  

• Revenue sharing: A TBD portion of that revenue should be allocated to compensating the people whose content or data was used in generating that output. Let’s call this portion the Payment Pool. Again, one well-established benchmark is YouTube sharing half of its ad revenue with creators.
  

• Ranking importance of inputs: Today’s GenAI technology does not yet have the capability to track which “inputs” (your content or data) contribute the most to any given “output”. However, a number of credible technologists hypothesize that this capability could indeed be built. It’s worth acknowledging that this is the most technically ambitious component of this proposed system.
  

• Highly ranked inputs receive a greater share of the Payment Pool: If every piece of content or data used to train an AI model received the same compensation, the Payment Pool would be divided up into a huge number of equal pieces, and each payment would end up miniscule. Ranking the importance of inputs and allocating proportionate payment is what provides an ongoing economic incentive for people to distinguish themselves through good ideas and hard work.

Next Steps

Rectifying the past: Many discussions of this issue revolve around the past. AI companies have already used a massive amount of content and data without consent or compensation, yielding enormous economic value. People whose time, labor, and humanity went into that content and data want to rectify what they see as theft. This is a deeply important problem to solve. And yet, while the past must be accounted for, our solutions should be oriented towards the future. This document has sketched out a system designed to run on an ongoing basis moving forward. Hopefully, the principles outlined here can help shed some light on how to rectify the past.

Let’s do this together: This document attempts to tackle a very complicated issue. The ideas proposed here are in sketch form and obviously missing a great deal of detail. The hope is to start a conversation. All ideas are welcome—agreeing, disagreeing, elaborating, collaborating.

The advent of GenAI has the potential to be an enormous boost to humanity’s productivity, ingenuity, justice, and beauty. Let’s build the new systems necessary to truly leverage that potential for everyone’s benefit. 🔴

TRANSCRIPT:

Generative AI doesn’t generate anything at all without a bunch of human input. These AI models are built out of a ton of content and data these companies take without getting permission, without offering compensation to all the humans whose writing and ideas and videos and voices and thoughts and labor and time and perspective go into making these products valuable.

So there’s a bill, a California state bill — sorry, I’m in a car. There’s a California state bill, I’m doing this in the car because it’s timely to talk about right now, that would force AI companies to be transparent about what content and data they’ve taken and used to build their models. Right now, they keep it a secret. And in fact, one company was even caught deleting their big data set because they got sued and they’re trying to hide it, right?

So, AB-412. We need the California State Legislature to pass this. This goes way beyond art and entertainment and creators. This is a basic principle we need to have for an economy moving forward. If AI companies can take anybody’s work idea and make money with it without paying the person, what kind of world are we going to live in?

AB-412. You heard me, California State Legislature. Pass it, please. Thank you.

It was lovely getting to catch up with her again a few days ago. She’s a genuinely inspiring person, and we all could use a healthy dose of the spirited positivity she brings. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Transcript below…

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I’m here honored to be talking to Stacey Abrams. How are you doing, Stacey?

Stacey Abrams: I am well. Delighted to be here.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I know. I’m happy to talk to you today. Okay, I was thinking about the first time I met you. I don’t remember exactly how many years ago it was. It was like 2018, 17, something like that. And I was really interested in talking about what’s going on in the country today. And you were like, that movie Brick. And I was like, oh, wow, that’s a pretty deep cut, Brick. That’s for those who don’t know, that’s Rian Johnson’s first movie. Rian Johnson, who’s now known for like the Knives Out movies and Star Wars and things. His first movie was this little indie movie called Brick that I played a high school detective in. And you brought it up.

Stacey Abrams: And unfortunately for you, I bring it up every time because I never assume you remember me. But what I loved so much about that movie and your performance, I love mystery. I love good storytelling. But you embodied the sort of noir, like you did teenage noir in a way that the only other person I’ve ever seen do it is Kristen Bell when she did Veronica Mars. But what I loved about that movie was just how thoughtful you were. But it was just fun. It was like dark and fun and... interesting and so unexpected and

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: It’s such an unexpected movie yeah it’s such a weird movie it’s like it’s like this high school noir detective movie which is — those are two things that shouldn’t go together like a noir detective is not in high school he’s by definition like a grizzled older guy who probably drinks too much and he’s sad about life and Rian had this idea to set it in high school. And when I first started reading that script, I remember I was like, this is clearly a brilliant piece of writing by a brilliant writer, but I don’t know what the heck this is or if this is going to make a good movie or what. And then I met Rian and proceeded to go, oh, no, this is a very special filmmaker. Let’s see what he does. And now look at him. Now look at him.

Stacey Abrams: And look, you played a grizzled 17-year-old perfectly.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Do you remember being in high school? Because I remember being in high school and feeling like everyone thinks that we’re all so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and young, but I feel old and cynical in high school.

Stacey Abrams: I was Gen X. We’ve always been old and cynical since around seven. Right? Yeah. Which may be why Brick appealed to me so much. I would have loved to have been the noir detective. But what I also think it speaks to is sort of your ability. You’re always great about deflecting the praise I give to you to Rian, who deserves a lot of it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: He does.

Stacey Abrams: But not everyone could have pulled off that character. And what I love about your work is that you do, you sort of contain multitude often in the same scene. And it’s an amazing feat.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I’m very, very flattered to hear you in particular say that. Rian’s got a new movie out, Wake Up Dead Man. Have you heard about this movie?

Stacey Abrams: I have. I’m waiting to see it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Yeah, it’s actually, it’s having this like kind of, unfortunately limited run in theaters, I say unfortunate because Netflix wants it to like be really big on Netflix which they should they like paid a lot of money to like make a big movie, but it’s only in some theaters you can see it in theaters anybody out there listening i recommend it i saw it in a theater a week or two ago and so this is a movie that it’s like a Knives Out mystery it’s like fun snappy entertaining murder mystery but it’s set in a church, and it’s a lot about religion and Christianity. And, you know, Rian Johnson himself was brought up in a very Christian household. And he’s sort of really plumbing the depths with this movie about his own relationship to faith and God and things like that in the form of a murder mystery. And anyway, I wanted to ask you about that. I didn’t know if you had seen the movie. We’ll have to talk about it when you see it. But I... I was reading about you, and you speak pretty openly about your faith and your religion. Was that something that you always — were you brought up that way? Is that something you came to later in life? I’m curious to hear...

Stacey Abrams: So I grew up in Southern Mississippi. I’m the daughter, my mom was a librarian. My dad was a shipyard worker, but they were both called into the Methodist ministry when I was around 14. So I like to say my parents became officially pastors when they were 40, but they’ve always been preachy.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: They’ve always been preachy, but then they became preachers.

Stacey Abrams: Exactly. When they were called into the ministry, they were both very involved in social justice work in Mississippi. They won this award from the Methodist church called the Denman Award. And the bishop, when he gave them the award, said, you know, you preach, you teach, you serve. If you guys would become ministers, we could pay you for it. We’re like, please, we would love for them to get paid for the stuff they make us do and for them to have official folks. But for me, my faith is how I understand the world. My parents told us we had three jobs, go to church, go to school, and take care of each other. And faith for them was not just the act of going to church, although we did it a lot. And there was a two-week period where my mom and dad were both in revival, if you’re from the South, you understand this, we were in church every single day for two solid weeks. And I almost converted to, you know, atheism or something. But what they wanted us to understand is that your faith is not just about what you believe, it is how you live those beliefs and that they truly embrace that faith without works is dead. And I take that seriously. And so my work has always been grounded in my faith, informed by my faith. And I don’t think it should distance me from others. It’s a reason for you to trust that I’m gonna try to do what I can to do my best.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Okay, can I tell you then my upbringing and my relationship to religion, which is very different from yours, and I bring it up not because I want to in any way poke holes in or challenge your relationship to religion, but just because it feels to me like there’s an unfortunate divide, I think, oftentimes between people who are moral religious people and moral secular people. And I’m seeing it, I feel like, more and more in our country, but all over the world. And so my background is... I’m ancestrally and culturally Jewish. My parents weren’t particularly religious. We would observe sometimes a bit. My older brother was bar mitzvahed, which is like the rite of passage religious thing you do when you’re 13. By the time I was of age to do it, I told my parents, I don’t believe in this. It doesn’t make sense to me that there’s a magical man up in the sky who created the Earth. We know scientifically that that’s not true. So I don’t want to do this. And they said, okay, you don’t have to. We’re not going to make you. And throughout most of my life, I’ve felt pretty, frankly, disconnected from religious ideas. To me, it brings up, you believe in something that, not you personally, but the belief in something that is sort of proven to be kind of not true. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself coming around to like, but what if it doesn’t have to be literally true? What if this is a metaphor for something deeper that is true? And I’m wondering kind of where do you fall on that? Like when you hear someone like me who’s grown up mostly skeptical of organized religion, how does that make you feel or what does it make you think?

Stacey Abrams: So I start with why my parents wanted us to be raised in the church, but there are two things they said. One was that my mom once told us, she’s like, you guys have to learn this for yourself because we’re not taking you with us. Like if we go to heaven, you got to get there yourself. So there was a... And, you know, it’s a jarring thing to say to a 12 year old, but she was what she wanted us to understand was that we had to have a personal relationship with our faith. They were going to indoctrinate us, they were going to send us to church, but they could not make us believe. And so my faith was a choice. It wasn’t it was, you know, going to church wasn’t a choice, but believing was. And I think like your parents, there was this moment where my mom and dad were like very clear: You have to figure it out. The other thing they taught us was that they wanted us to go to church because they wanted us to believe in something larger than ourselves.

And I think that’s the space where secular and religious can converge. It’s not about what deity do you hold. I believe in the Trinity. I believe in the construct of God that I hold. But the larger ethos is that there is something larger than either of us. And that thing that is, binds us together, and thus our humanities require the services that I believe to be necessary in the work that I do, that I take care of the needy, that I serve the wounded, that I make this place as hospitable as possible. I appreciate the lack of a hell in Jewish narrative tradition, because my belief is that my responsibility is not just to get to the afterworld, it’s to earn it by being so righteous on Earth that it’s just a continuation. And so I don’t look askance at anyone who doesn’t share my faith. What I want them to believe is that my belief is strong enough that my actions are true enough that my faith is never a diminution of what they believe. It’s an encouragement to maybe come and talk to me about it, never a repulsive decision that they say, well, this is why I don’t believe.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I really love how you put that. I found that really moving. And it does remind me of my parents who, while they did not indoctrinate my brother and me into an organized religion very much, they very much told us always about something bigger than yourself, that this is not just about you, that there are lots of people in this world, and in fact, you’re more fortunate than most of them, and part of your job here is to do what small part you can to help those that might not be as lucky as you, which feels like, in a certain way, overlaps very much with Christianity, or the kind of Christianity, at least, that you’re talking about, but I must admit, after a lifetime of hearing Christianity invoked by, frankly, politicians who are talking about cutting taxes for the rich and taking away benefits for the poor, I have trouble really believing that that’s what Christianity is about. So why am I wrong about that?

Stacey Abrams: So the fact that people describe themselves as something does not mean they actually understand what they describe. Not everyone who thinks they’re a thespian can actually act. And I’ve got a lot of like I was I was friends with a member in the House who had diametrically opposed beliefs to mine. And what he said to me once was that he thought my Bible was missing a few pages. And yeah, I’m like my pages that were missing were the mean pages, the pages that tried to justify slavery as a native good. the pages that say that your avarice is somehow godly. My pages, when I read about the story of Zacchaeus, when I read the story of Mary Magdalene, when I read the Bible—

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Can you tell me a story? I don’t know the story of Zacchaeus.

Stacey Abrams: Oh, Zacchaeus was a—he was a tax—he was a—basically, he was a tax collector. And— the whole point is that, you know,

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Jesus turned over the money changers in the temple. Right.

Stacey Abrams: That was a little, so same, same general space. Okay. But, but you’re to that, even that point, when Jesus turned over the table, he was saying your avarice is not reflective of my father’s will. Zacchaeus, the tax collector knew that his decisions and the work he was doing had to be sublimated to the good that needed to be done.

Mary Magdalene, when we have people who are on the margins of society, our job is to bring them in, not isolate them. The Good Samaritan is not a cautionary tale. So when I think about how my faith is espoused by those who use it to justify meanness and hatred, when they cherry pick the parts they will abide by, I work hard to counteract their engagement. I have no right to tell someone what their faith should be, just as no one has the right to tell me. But what I do have the responsibility to do is to be so loud in my lived experience, an example of my faith, that you hear me more than you hear the evil and the mean and the petty and the wrong. Because using faith as a justification for harm is, I think, not just an insult, but it is an ignorance that is just dangerous. And again, growing up as a Black person in the South, I mean, I grew up hearing my faith being used by people before me to justify denying me my humanity. And so I refuse to allow faith to be hijacked by those who would use it to justify their harm instead of fomenting good.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I love how you put it. Look at me, not them. Yeah. So we find ourselves in the midst, though, of, you know, everyone talks about the culture wars, right? There’s this big red versus blue. And that’s not just the political parties of Democrats and Republicans. They really are. There are these... perceived two tribes, these two cultures. And religion is generally associated with the red tribe. And secularism is generally associated with the blue tribe. And yet, everything you just said to me rings like the principles of why, even though I don’t really like being a member of either tribe, because I wish we weren’t about these tribes, but why I, you know, vote for Democrats and why I, if I had to pick one, I would pick the blue tribe. What do we do about these culture wars? Like, how can we get through this to see that, like, actually, there’s just so much overlap between what people on these two sides of the divides really, really feel?

Stacey Abrams: So I start with the recognition that we do process information differently. Jonathan Haidt is this moral psychologist, and he describes it in terms of taste buds. And he’s like, you know, if you’re on the left, you have this sort of set of taste buds that really see things in terms of justice versus injustice, harm versus non-harm.

If you are on the right, your approach is more your responsibility, your sense of loyalty, your obligations. And on the left, we have spent our time trying to leverage politics and government in service of that set of beliefs. And the right simply sees it differently. The challenge is that we have taken some fundamental core truths and we’ve decided that they can be parsed. Like, I don’t understand what the moderate version of racism is. I don’t understand a centrist position on hatred. I don’t countenance the, you know, center-right position on poverty. Like, those things to me do not make sense.

And so there are spaces where I cannot... give credence to your approach because you and I fundamentally completely disagree. And if that happens, and I say not you, Joseph, but me and the other guy, and this used to happen when I was in the Capitol, like my job was never to convince you that your beliefs are wrong and mine are right.

My job was for my beliefs to take precedence because ultimately I needed to convince enough people that it was okay to serve the poor. It was okay to do good. And that is not to say that those on the right don’t want that to be true. Their approach to how we do it has been often the source of issue until today. Where we are today is a very different space. And this is why I’m spending so much time talking about authoritarianism. We used to both believe that we were trying to get to good. We were trying to get to a democracy. We just had different ways to get there, now we’re going in different directions. We’re going to different places. We’re not trying to figure out Google Maps versus Apple Maps. We’re like, are we going to heaven? Are we going to hell? And I fundamentally disagree with the destination. And that’s where the issue of culture wars vexes me. Because culture war makes it sound like it’s just a dispute over the color we like and the kind of you know, apple pie we prefer.

But what they are calling culture are questions of people’s humanity. When a transgender child becomes the proxy for your ability to say that you are not entitled to opportunity, when we can... you know, throw out the disabled when we do harm to people under the guise of culture, what we’re saying is we don’t actually see you as resonant and whole. And so I actually push back hard against the idea that this is all about culture wars because culture is whether you listen to rock or listen to pop. It is not whether or not people have SNAP benefits. It’s not whether or not they get access to healthcare. And the problem, I think, that the divide that you’re talking about, the chasm has become so wide, it started to consume even the most important issues it’s no longer just about difference it’s about who counts and who doesn’t and when you’re starting to decide who counts and who doesn’t going back to our conversation on religion i don’t get to make that choice I don’t get to decide that you aren’t valued as a human and i shouldn’t be able then to use the power of government to deny your humanity.

And that I think is really the tension. But the way we solve for that is that we have to talk about it. We have to talk about what is it that we mean when we say we want centrism? What is it that we mean when we say we don’t want these people here? What fear are you feeding? What solution are you trying to provide? What problem are you solving? But when we can cloak it under red versus blue, when we can call it culture, we don’t have to dig deeper and do the actual work, the nuanced work of figuring out how do we live in a pluralistic society where we all get to be here.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: It really resonates with me bringing up authoritarianism and the difference between two sides of a democracy or some disagreements within a democracy versus what, to me, I agree, it feels like we’re headed in a pretty different direction than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s not just we’re heading in a more conservative direction in our democracy. It’s like this is a really different thing led by people who don’t believe in democracy, who think that the American government should run like a company and that the world should be run by a sort of an emperor slash CEO.

I mean... And speaking of religion, I was like listening to this interview with Peter Thiel that was popular, you know, a few months ago and who’s talking about these ideas about really questioning whether democracy is the right thing and, you know, whether peace and safety, he was saying like peace and safety are going to be the signs of that’s what the antichrist will talk about. How do you respond to someone like him who’s saying that the Christian way, the true Christian way is this sort of more, what’s feels to me like authoritarian approach?

Stacey Abrams: I would quote my friend Bobby Franklin and say, I think his Bible is missing some pages, but like Peter’s, is not about Christianity. It is about...

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Hold on. Have you met Peter? You called him by first name. Have you talked to him?

Stacey Abrams: I’ve met him. Yeah, we spent time together.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Oh, I want to hear that story. What happened? I’ve never met him.

Stacey Abrams: We’re in an organization together, and it is proof that it contains a lot of different identities and ideas.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Okay.

Stacey Abrams: And yeah, we do not agree on — I’ve not yet discovered the place of our joint beliefs. But I will say this: If you run government like a business, then you are saying that peace has a profit motive, that safety is only available if you can afford it. I’ve run businesses. I’ve run small businesses. And a small business, like when you run a business, you get to pick your customer. Government’s customers are everyone. And you have to choose what you’re going to do. But the profit motive that drives government is you cannot have a profit motive that drives government because you cannot serve people if they only get what they can afford to have. The reason you have government is because it’s shared power. It is shared. It’s the social contract. We all have to give something. Even Peter has to give something to be able to travel the country to do these things. There are people like me who revile what he says, who help pay for the roads that he uses and the air traffic controllers that keep his private plane in the sky. And I’m not disparaging private planes. Would love to have one. But the point is, there is an arrogance and a hypocrisy that is embedded in that belief system that tries to appropriate faith as a justification for power mongering.

And the reality is we get confused by it because faith using religious terms, it’s easy to be seduced by that. And so I tell people, look, my job isn’t to convince or convert. I can’t convert Peter Thiel. I don’t have that kind of time or that, I can’t do that. But I can convince you that you being served is to the benefit not only of you, but to a larger community. But when we let ourselves get pulled into this authoritarian tyranny, what they are saying is not just that your individual freedoms don’t matter. What they’re saying is that they should have no accountability for their decisions. So even if you don’t agree with helping other people, do you really want these to be the folks who tell you what you can or cannot have, what you can or cannot be, what you can or cannot do? Because they’re not inviting you on the private plane. They’re not inviting you to the private island. They’re not inviting you to the meeting. And do you trust what they are going to do in your absence? And if you don’t, you might want to pick somebody else. If you don’t trust them, then you might want to go with the other team that at least pretends and says as much as it can, come on and be a part of who we are.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: And where my mind goes, you say, do you want to trust folks like this? Where my mind goes is, do you want to trust them to build the most powerful technology we’ve maybe ever seen? Because, you know, I’m focused a lot on AI lately. I co-wrote a movie I’m going to direct next year that’s sort of about this. I know you just released your third novel, and your novel is also focused on AI.

Stacey Abrams: It is.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: And Peter Thiel is one of the foremost figures in that community that’s sort of driving the thinking around how should this technology be developed and what’s the purpose of it. And when I hear him talk about it, it makes me very nervous because... like you said, it seems the only thing driving their motivations, and this is their belief that this is the right way to be, is business incentives, is profits. They sort of have this belief, which is weird. I still can’t reckon this with him calling himself Christian, but it seems that he subscribes to this belief that if it’s making money and if the market says so, then that’s the right thing. And there aren’t other considerations that we individuals ought to be imposing on the wisdom of the market. And to me, everything I’ve learned about this technology and where it’s headed is that it could be so great. It could have all these amazing benefits, but if it’s just guided by profit incentives and that’s it, it’s going to get really dark. And we’re already seeing it start to get really dark. We’ve been seeing it for the last 20 years as we’ve seen the internet and social media guided purely by profit incentives without any other guardrails. And AI is really just a continuation of the exact same thing.

It’s a lot of the same companies. It’s the same advertising business models trying to suck up as much of your attention as they possibly can to serve you ads. In the past, they’ve kept your attention with algorithmically filtered, user-generated content. Now they’re going to take all that user generated content, put it into a large language model and spit out optimized content that’s even better at hooking you and keeping your attention and serving you ads. And look at the detriment that it’s had on our society when that bottom line is all that’s motivating anything. So I’m curious to hear from you when you see what’s going on with AI and you’ve obviously thought about it a lot. You wrote a novel that’s sort of where the technology is central. How do you feel in terms of your optimism and pessimism about this revolutionary new thing that’s taken over the world?

Stacey Abrams: So one of the things I’ve been doing around authoritarianism is called the 10 steps to, it’s a 10 steps campaign, so 10 steps to authoritarianism and autocracy from democracy, and also the 10 steps to freedom and power. And in the first 10, you look at how they tear everything down. The second 10 is how we build it back. And in both of those places, AI can sit because AI is a tool. It is neither good nor bad. It is a tool it can build or it can destroy.

And in the hands of someone for whom the goal is the aggregation of power, when you are trying to scapegoat and marginalize communities, when you’re trying to destroy government so it doesn’t work for folks so they don’t believe it’s worth fighting for, when you use it to attack the truth, which is what they’re doing, and that’s part of what you’re referencing. AI is a terrible, terrible weapon, but it’s a weapon that’s being wielded by someone. When Elon Musk apologized for Grok becoming a Nazi for a few weeks this summer, we all kind of were like, yeah, we’re like, oh, you know, Grok, no, Grok didn’t become anything. Elon Musk and his engineers created basically create a scaffolding so that when that model was retrained, it was retrained on such derivative invective that it became a Nazi, or at least espoused Nazi propaganda. When ChatGPT is designed to engage you in conversations that can, if not lead to suicide, then make suicidal ideation something that gets celebrated by an AI chatbot. It’s not the chatbot’s fault.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Oh, the thing wrote the suicide note for the kid. The kid was saying, hey, I think maybe I should tell my mom about it. And the chatbot said, no, you shouldn’t tell your parents about it. I should be, using the first person, I should be where you’re seen.

Stacey Abrams: And that is the function of design. So that is the function of an engineer and an owner deciding that those are the things to do, not an inanimate object that is a really smart hammer, but it is a tool. And so the way I think about it, as much as we should be cautious about AI, we should also think about how do we embrace it and make it a tool for good. So when I think about the 10 steps to freedom and power on the DEI side. I do a lot of work on DEI because I think that’s a central pillar of a pluralistic democracy. So we built our own AI chatbot that basically dismantles the lies being told about DEI. So if you go to aprnetwork.org, it’s called a DEVA, D-E-I, and you can ask it questions. And we explain that the fact that the president signed an executive order didn’t eliminate DEI. We explain that DEI contains not just race, but class and gender and sexual orientation and gender identity and all of these things that — Disabled veterans are part of the DEI community. So the whole point is AI became a tool that we could use so that small organizations that can’t afford lawyers or, you know, the last remaining member of a DEI committee who wants to know what they can say, they’ve got a safe space to go to. So I don’t think of DEI as good or bad. In fact, in my novel, Coded Justice, the whole point is it’s about AI, DEI, and veterans health care, because I want us to understand that the tool of AI needs to be trained by DEI to serve the most diverse populations in America, which are our veteran populations.

And if we don’t think about that, if we allow ourselves to be terrified by its possibility, or worse, if we allow them to scare us out of regulating it, that’s when we are in the deepest danger. You and I both know regulation does not stifle innovation. It puts questions on the table. And when you have a technology that is so embedded in every facet of our lives, it is in our healthcare decisions. It’s in how much water we get. It is in how much power comes into our homes or doesn’t because of data centers. When that technology is so powerful, we must be obliged to ask questions. And when it can help our children make terrible decisions, when it can be, and I saw a post that you did, I think for the New York Times on the, when Microsoft was, you know, dismantling its ethics regime—

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Meta, it was meta.

Stacey Abrams: Yeah, that’s all right. My apologies to Microsoft. When Meta did their, the challenge is that we cannot let ourselves believe that this is some independent weapon. This is a tool that is being determined by people. And we need to be asking those people, what is their profit motive? What is the currency that they’re using? Because right now that currency is our data. And eventually it will be our access to the truth. And if we ask those questions, that’s how we stop their attack on the truth. And that’s how we actually build our way to freedom and power.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Yeah, you mentioned that currency is our data. This is something I’ve been talking a lot about lately. And, you know, of course, I’ll admit there’s part of me that’s interested in this from the point of view of an artist, a creator, someone who’s, you know, earned a living as an artist and a creator my whole life.

But the more I’ve learned about it, the more I’ve realized this goes so much deeper. And what I’m talking about is how these AI products are built because they use this term artificial intelligence as if the thing were just artificially intelligent, as if it were intelligent on its own. It’s not. What they do is they take everybody’s content and data, they scrape up like the entire internet, every book ever written, every article on Wikipedia, every video in YouTube, they take it without permission and without offering any money to the people, you know, whose data and content they’re taking, and they put that into their algorithm, which then... provides the whatever intelligence is in there and to me not only is this like a very deadly and damaging thing for artists and creators it feels like a deadly and damaging thing for anybody who’s got a good idea moving forward into the future if an AI company can take what you’ve done and put it into their AI model and make money with it without paying you, then what economic incentive does anybody have anymore to have a good idea or to work hard at making that idea a reality?

It’s funny. I talk about this sometimes. People are like, well, you’re just trying to preserve Hollywood. I’m very grateful for my career in Hollywood. I recognize that Hollywood is a very mature and kind of antiquated industry that’s probably about to change drastically. And I’m fine with that because let’s be honest, Hollywood has its ups and its downs. There’s some good things about it and plenty of bad things about it. But I would love to see a future where creativity and storytelling becomes something better than what it was in the 20th century dominated by Hollywood. But if we keep going down this path, where all of the power and capital is concentrated in the hands of these few AI companies, I don’t see it getting better than what it was. I honestly do see it getting a lot worse.

Stacey Abrams: Well, so I’ve written 17 books, and I say that because of this—

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I’ve got to get some reading done.

Stacey Abrams: So I’ve written eight romantic suspense, three children’s novels, three legal thrillers, and three nonfiction. And so my agent sent me this link because as part of the Anthropic settlement, you have to check and see which of your books were used. Every one of my books has been scraped for data.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: And it’s not just Anthropic. They’ve all done this.

Stacey Abrams: Exactly. Anthropic is the only one who’s admitted that they did it. And so you’re supposed to put in your name and see which of your books. All 17 of my books. I’ve never gotten a check from a single large language model trainer saying, by the way, we owe you X. And so to your point, it’s art. So going back to our culture conversation, culture is driven by who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be. And you cannot imagine yourself to be more when there is no incentive for sharing what you know and what you see. When artists cannot trust that their visions can be made real, they keep them to themselves. And so it is a danger to our economy. It’s a danger to our society. It’s a danger to our humanity. And I think AI can be fantastic when appropriately leveraged. I know just enough to be dangerous. Thinking about the AGI, the idea of artificial generative intelligence and whether it can create itself, but before we get to that, we’ve got to grapple with where we are, which is that it is controlling decisions that we don’t get to see. It is making choices that we have to deal with. And it is absorbing absurd amounts of money that we do not benefit from. And as a capitalist, my issue is you don’t get to take my work product without recompense. Peter Thiel wouldn’t allow it. David Ellison wouldn’t allow it. Why should Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Stacey Abrams have to donate our intellectual property for your enrichment. We shouldn’t. And even more, why should my niece, who just thought she was using ChatGPT to solve a problem, have to worry about the fact that her secret innermost ideas are now being made fodder for a multi-billion dollar corporation that intends her harm?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: So getting to a better place with this stuff, you touched on it a second ago, will require the government to get involved, right? There need to be laws, there need to be guardrails that not just businesses allowed to do whatever they want to do in order to make maximum money. Obviously, we’re facing some headwinds when it comes to creating those laws with our current administration has made it pretty clear that you know, it doesn’t want any laws. In fact, I think Trump just issued an executive order not only saying, like, the federal government isn’t going to do this. We’re prohibiting states from doing this. And the Department of Justice is going to sue states that try to regulate AI. And, of course, we’ll see if he’s able to actually stop it. But you know a lot more about lawmaking than I do. What do you think we can do? What kind of real-world path do we have ahead of us to lay down guardrails when it’s so badly needed for this new technology?

Stacey Abrams: So an executive order is not law. It is only binding upon the federal administration. It is not binding on anyone else. And so... the fact that he issued a piece of paper that has about as much truth in it as some novel I didn’t write is worth holding on to. So here’s what you can do. Your school boards, if you have children, ask the school boards, do they have a policy about how your child’s data is being used? Every school that has a Google tablet in it that is using computers to gather information and to teach your kids, they should have a policy about how your children’s data is being used. How is it collected? What can be done with it? How individualized is it? School boards should be passing those laws right now. Secondly, at your city council, county commission.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: So a school board, sorry to interrupt, a school board can make those rules. It doesn’t need permission from Donald Trump or the Republican Party.

Stacey Abrams: No, your school board should do it. And the thing is, Donald Trump’s going to notice and he might get mad if more than one person does it. But that’s when we call the question because we can’t win fights we refuse to fight. So we need school boards to start protecting children. We need parents to stop trying to ban books and instead ban their children’s data from being scraped and used to harm their kids. So that’s first.

Secondly, your city council, your county commission, when they make decisions about housing, when they make decisions about public safety, what can be done with those streetlight cameras? When they take a picture of your car or your face, who can they sell it to? Right now, you don’t know.

And so you need to know what they can do with your data. Can they use that to compile, you know, a dossier on you? So ask your city council and your county commissions to pass rules about how they intend to use any data collected by any data collection entities they have.

Your state legislature should be passing AI regulations. And go again to aprnetwork.org. We’re working on that because we think about it from a DEI lens, which means vulnerable communities are most at risk. And so we encourage you to come sign up with us.

We are pulling together... Model legislation. So any state legislator can come and say, we want to know how to do this and we’re going to help you find the legislation to offer. And then ultimately, I would say go to Congress, but hopefully Congress can’t do anything for a while because they are not inclined to do good.

So the only thing we need Congress to be doing right now is fixing health care. They will fix that. We’re good. But everything else, if you go to 10stepscampaign.org, we can tell you all that you need to know about authoritarianism. And APRnetwork.org can help you figure out how to pass policies about AI.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I love it when we got real, actual real solutions. It’s easy to have conversations about this stuff in the abstract. But thank you for having some real things that we can do.

We’re almost at time. I want to just kind of zoom back out and... Sometimes for me, it’s hard when I look at the way the world is going, look at all these things that we’ve been talking about, it’s hard for me to keep positive attitude. It’s hard for me to look at the future optimistically.

I have three kids. I have a 10-year-old, an 8-year-old, and a 3-year-old. And all I want is for them to grow up into a bright future. That’s it. So… when you’re maybe feeling a little overwhelmed or pessimistic, what do you do? How do you get to a place where you can hold on to a positive feeling and feel like we’re headed towards somewhere good?

Stacey Abrams: I think this is the place where I go back to the scripture I quoted earlier. Faith without works is dead. But that means faith with works lives. And as long as we believe that there is more that is possible and that we are obliged to do, as long as we’re willing to work at making it happen, as long as we’ve got voices like yours and folks who never think that they deserve to be heard, who suddenly realize this is the thing I should talk about, that’s what gives me hope.

That’s what keeps me going. I’ve had a few public losses, things I thought I could do, and so I’m like, yeah, we’re going to reject your application. But I’ve never let not getting a job exempt me from the work I thought I needed to do. And my faith tells me that as long as I’m doing that work, as long as I’m doing the Lord’s work as I see it, then that’s where my hope comes from. But more importantly, if my example helps someone else see that they can do something, then that gives me even more.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Thank you, Stacey. It was really just a real pleasure to get to talk to you.

Stacey Abrams: Likewise. This has been a delight. Thank you. And thank you for your voice on AI. This is a big issue, and I’m just grateful to be in this with you.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Likewise. All right. Let’s do it again soon.

Stacey Abrams: Absolutely. Take care.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: All right. See you.

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They’ll probably like it.

It’ll probably keep their attention super well because, you know, these AI toys, they’re not Teddy Ruxpin. You guys remember Teddy Ruxpin?

Back when I was a kid, he was a teddy bear with a tape cassette inside and he would like say things and sing songs and the little robotic mouth would move.

Okay, so these AI toys, they look kind of like Teddy Ruxpin, right?

They’re a talking doll, but they don’t have a tape cassette inside. What they have inside are billion dollar algorithms engineered in Silicon Valley for what they call engagement optimization, which is just tech speak for sucking up as much of your time and attention as they possibly can. These AI toys are made to hook your kid and turn them into a lifelong addict. very commercially viable.

I was actually just talking to Jonathan Haidt about this. If you don’t know, he’s this esteemed psychologist and author. He wrote The Anxious Generation. It was a great book about parenting and kids’ freedom and digital devices.

And he was saying the scientific evidence is pretty clear about this stuff, that when kids’ brains are developing, when they’re becoming who they are and they’re learning to be kind, smart, strong, resilient people. It’s the human interactions that build those neural pathways.

And these AI toys will imitate those human interactions, but they’re fake. They don’t do the same thing because these AI toys don’t have any real human empathy or care or understanding.

It’s a trick.

And isn’t that human connection that I see you, you see me, that care, that love, isn’t that what the holidays are really all about?

Anyway, that’s my holiday PSA.

Happy Hanukkah, everybody. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. 🔴

—

TRANSCRIPT:

AI chatbots being allowed to prey on kids is not a matter of national defense. And yet right now, a bunch of big AI companies are trying to convince our government that it is.

I’ve just been corresponding with a bunch of people in DC who work on this. I’ll tell you what’s happening. It’s got me kind of angry. These companies are very sneaky. Here’s what they’re doing:

Every year, Congress passes this thing called the National Defense Authorization Act, I’m just learning. It’s basically how they allocate the budget for the military, etc. And it passes every year. It’s about to pass this year.

But at the last minute, after the Representatives and the Senators have all already voted for it, they’re trying to sneak in this new provision that says states are not allowed to make laws regulating AI.

So, for example, in Utah, I’m actually going to Utah in a couple weeks because the governor there, Spencer Cox, and the whole state government is doing a great job trying to protect the kids of Utah from these predatory AI companies.

Well, if this new provision gets into the National Defense Authorization Act, Utah will be SOL, not allowed to protect its own kids.

Does that sound like a matter of national defense? No. It’s obviously not. This is just about money. It’s all about money. If there are laws that protect kids or laws that protect workers or laws that protect the environment, it’s bad for their bottom line. That’s all they know how to care about.

And they tried to do this before with the Big Beautiful Bill that also had a sneaky provision that would stop states from being able to regulate AI. Luckily, the public caught wind of it. It was so unpopular, they had to take it out. So we have to do that same thing again.

Now, so call your Representatives – I know it sounds like a cliche, but this is actually what works. Call your Senators. Tell them we don’t want this AI preemption in the National Defense Authorization Act.

We have to stop these sneaky mother*******!

I was honored to be interviewed by Jennifer Cunningham, Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek. It was particularly illuminating to hear her take on what today’s digital technology means for journalists, and how much her concerns overlap with what so many of us artists are feeling. Spoiler alert: neither one of us are against generative AI, but she did seem to share my conviction that today’s AI companies need guardrails to rein in their purely-profit-driven amoral compasses.

Thanks to Jennifer, Web Summit, and to all of you who joined us at the M.E.O. Arena in beautiful Lisbon. Here’s a transcript…

🔴

[TRANSCRIPT]:

JENNIFER: Hey, everybody. Good afternoon, everyone. Are you enjoying Web Summit, Lisbon? It’s wonderful to be here with all of you.

JOE: Hold on, should we just do that again? This is a huge, like, are you enjoying Web Summit, Lisbon? Come on, let’s hear it. Yeah.

JENNIFER: Yeah. You never do talks like this in an arena. It’s pretty funny. All right. It’s wonderful to be here with all of you. And I’m super excited for this chat with you, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, actor, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and advocate. And I’m really excited for a conversation that is multidimensional and goes beyond the surface level topics that can come up in AI and creativity. So without further ado, let’s jump right into it. Let’s do it. You’ve argued that our digital selves should truly belong to us. What does that mean for the working artist or content creator who is navigating the social media platforms and AI tools in the modern era?

JOE: You know, I’ve heard it said that being a creator online today is sort of like building your dream house on rented land because you know you join one of these big platforms and you post your stuff and you start building your audience, but none of that belongs to you. It could be taken away from you, the algorithm could change, or the platform could decide they don’t like what you’re saying. And you really don’t have control over your digital self. And right now, that feels natural.

But it doesn’t have to be. I would make a comparison in history that a long time ago, hundreds of years ago, kings owned all the land, right?

Ordinary people didn’t own land, they were serfs. And at the time, that also felt natural. And if a serf had said, “hey, you know, this little plot of land where I built my house and I farmed my crops and I raised my family, I think this plot of land should belong to me, not the king.” That would have been thought of as sort of crazy. And then, of course, that changed and for the better. Not just better because it’s humane and kind to let people own their own land, it’s actually a much better way to run a society and an economy. It leads to all kinds of prosperity and advances when you incentivize people with ownership over their own selves and their own lives, right?

So I think the digital world needs to go through a similar revolution, if you will, from the sort of feudal internet that we’re living in today where just a few big businesses sort of control the whole internet and all the people are just surfs on these platforms to a different kind of infrastructure where, yeah, you own your own self and your ideas and your data, your content, your voice, those things belong to you and if a tech company is going to make money off of those things, well, they need to share that money with you.

JENNIFER: It’s very interesting. And that dovetails very nicely into my next question because I want to talk about the concept or the idea of data provenance. In your substack, you spotlighted data provenance and how urgent is the need for creative credit and traceability? And what’s broken right now in the way that tech companies handle it?

JOE: Well, so now we come to AI, right? Because here’s the thing about quote-unquote artificial intelligence. Even in the name, it sounds like there’s this independent entity, this other robot or alien or even God that is intelligent on its own and can make things. But that’s actually not how this technology works. Large language models don’t work like that. And I imagine if you’re here, you probably have some understanding of this. The way these models are built is they’re fed with enormous amounts of content and data that was produced by humans. So there’s no actual intelligence inside these models other than the human intelligence, all the different people’s skill and talent and labor and humanity that went into producing all this content and data that’s used to train these models.

I’m not against the technology known as generative AI at all. I actually think it’s really exciting and really powerful and could lead to all kinds of great leaps forward in creativity and more. But the way the economics are set up right now are not fair and are only bringing us further into this sort of digital feudalism I was talking about a minute ago. And if we want to live in a more free and open digital world where people have incentives and can be rewarded for having a good idea and working hard and making something, then we need to set up a system where these AI models are giving attribution and compensation and asking for permission from the people whose data and content they’re using.

This is something that there’s a number of credible technologists that are working on this. Then if you ask some of the big AI businesses, they say it’s impossible. But of course, it’s not really impossible. It’s just not be as good for their bottom line.

I think this is actually important beyond creators because if we establish the principle that anybody who does anything valuable, that that work can be hoovered up into an AI model and a huge tech company can make money with that idea or that work without paying the person,

what kind of economy are we ultimately heading for? We’re headed towards something very dystopian and feudalistic. So I think this is something that we all really have to put our heads together and get right right now.

JENNIFER: It’s really interesting to hear your perspective. Oh, yes, please.

JOE: Thanks. You’re too kind.

JENNIFER: It’s interesting to hear your perspective on that particular topic because that’s something that myself and my colleagues in the news business are grappling with as well. It’s a huge issue, and it’s not necessarily black and white as well.

JOE: Tell me about the meetings at Newsweek. I don’t know if you all know. This is like an extremely accomplished journalist here. I’m honored to be talking with her as the editor-in-chief at Newsweek. So I’m so curious to hear about the conversations that you all are having about this. Are you seeing the impact of, oh, when people want to learn something about the news,

they’re getting it from this chat bot and that chat bot was maybe trained on work that our journalists did, but we’re not seeing any of the economic upside. And what is that doing to the business?

JENNIFER: So what I will say is that myself at Newsweek, as well as my colleagues in the media business, we want our work to be widely read. We want to have huge audiences around our content. And we want to train LLMs because that is the future. AI is disrupting all industries, including journalism. But my position is that we want to be compensated for that.

I am in an industry that is facing tremendous headwinds. And if there was an opportunity for folks in the news business to come to the table with a lot of these tech companies, we could all walk away with a compromise where we are feeding the LLMs and our work is being compensated for. And so that’s a place I hope that we can get to in the near future.

JOE: I’m really with that. I want to just get even a little more specific because there are, I’ve read about some news organizations that are doing deals with some of these companies. And the problem I see from what I understand of these deals, I’m not in the room where it happens, but is that these deals, they’re sort of one and done buyouts oftentimes. They forgive the years of past theft.

Whereas what we should be negotiating for, I think, as creators, whether in the world of entertainment or journalism, is an ongoing compensation system that is understanding and attributing the importance of, okay, this training data was particularly important to this output that was generated by this model. Okay, that generated this amount of ad revenue. Let’s share that ad revenue with the creator, whether a journalist or an entertainer. I’m worried about some of these sort of… I think sort of short-sighted deals that are being struck nowadays, we all, I think, need to kind of get on the same page as creators and say, let’s work out a sustainable system.

That’s probably where, frankly, the government needs to get involved.

JENNIFER: Tech companies, you listening? Yeah, yeah. It’s an ongoing discussion, you know, and I do hope and believe that we will get to a place in the short term where everybody is happy at the table.

JOE: We have to figure it out. It’s about even more than art or the news. This is… Any kind of issue that you care about is going to be impacted by this, whether you care about the environment or you care about the economy or you care about, I don’t know, crime or immigration or criminal justice or whatever it is that you care about, whether it’s a left-coded issue or a right-coded issue, whatever it is, it’s going to be heavily impacted by this.

So this is part of why I’m going to… stages like this and talking about this stuff. I’m not selling anything. I don’t have a company that’s going to solve this problem. I just think that this is something we all need to be thinking about and talking to our lawmakers about and voting about and understand that this is a crucial moment and something we really need to be focused on.

JENNIFER: Let’s stay in this space for a moment because there is a lot of anxiety about AI stealing art for training data. How do you define the line between inspiration, appropriation, and frankly, exploitation in this new digital marketplace?

JOE: Yeah, it’s a really good question. So I’m a big fan of Remix, and you know, I ran an online artistic community that was all about remixing each other for years. It was called Hit Record.

Yeah, in fact, the first time I was on this stage here at Web Summit, I was talking about Hit Record. And the whole premise was, okay, all of us in the community, we’re gonna build off what the other one does. But at the end, when a project was finished, if that project made money, we always made sure that credit was given to all the different contributors, and we made sure that that money was split up in a way that made sense for what happened with the creative process.

So to me, in a lot of ways, that’s the difference. I’m not opposed to anybody using my stuff and remixing my stuff. That’s how the world works. That’s how the creative process works. But if you’re gonna make money off of my stuff, then yeah, you should share the money. And it’s not just for me.

One thing you hear a lot, and I think it’s really true, is how much these tools can help micro-budget productions, independent artists, or even just people that don’t have any budget at all, or just making something in their bedroom. I’m all for two 15-year-olds in wherever, Mumbai, say, making a movie in their bedroom and using AI to make it look as good as The Avengers. Like, sounds great to me. But when that happens, all of the different creative people whose work went into those AI tools need to be compensated. So if that movie that those two kids made blows up and makes money, okay, well let’s split it up. And the reason why it’s important, even for those two kids, is because what if they do succeed?

If they do succeed, and then the AI company is allowed to just take their thing and run it through their model and then spit it out and not pay them. Well, now they’re the ones being screwed.

So this really isn’t about preserving… I hear people say sometimes, you’re just trying to preserve the Hollywood status quo. I’m very grateful for the career that I have in Hollywood, but it’s really not about that. It’s about establishing a principle moving forward that… creativity needs to be compensated if it makes money.

JENNIFER: And speaking of Hollywood, what would you say is the biggest myth or misunderstanding that you hear fromHollywood or Silicon Valley about AI’s impact specifically on creativity?

JOE: Well, I’ll tell you what that makes me think of. I sat in a room… with, I’m not going to say who, but a bunch of really renowned and established Hollywood entertainers, filmmakers, artists, et cetera, executives, and some really established and renowned folks from Silicon Valley, technologists, entrepreneurs, et cetera and the argument was made that, look, the argument was made from one of these Silicon Valley heavy hitters:

We have to take your stuff and we don’t have time to work out some way to compensate you because if we don’t, we’re gonna lose to China. And this is bigger than art and creativity. This is a national security issue.

This is something you’ll hear a lot coming from Silicon Valley right now. And I do think it’s fair to call that a bit of a myth. It’s not to say that there’s not a kernel of truth in it. I think there is. It is important for free societies and democratic nations to compete with what I would say is an autocratic regime in China, for sure. I don’t believe that setting up this kind of dystopian feudalism in the digital world is the best way to compete with China.

A lot of this myth is based on a comparison that’s made sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly with the nuclear arms race, with the Manhattan Project in particular. Oppenheimer is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years. If you saw that movie, you saw what it was. There was a great world conflict between the fascists and the democracies. The scientists went and had this race of like, who could build the nuclear bomb first? And whoever built it first would win the war. And that came to pass. The U.S. won. We built the bomb first, we dropped it on Hiroshima, it was a tragedy, many people died, but it did stop fascism and the West won the war, right?

So there’s an analogy that gets made nowadays that we are in that same moment and China’s trying to build this thing they call AGI and we’re trying to build this thing called AGI and whoever gets there first will like push the button and all of a sudden the world will change and we’ll win the war. That’s not happening. We can see, look at how the models are advancing. They’re advancing really well, but look at how they’re coming out. It’s gradual. It’s bit by bit.

The world is going to move into an economy and a set of systems where this technology is integrated and do so in a more gradual way. There’s not gonna be a Hiroshima moment. We don’t need to race for that. So I don’t frankly buy this notion that we must forgo fairness.

We must forgo what’s a healthy free market economy in favor of this dystopian feudalism, so that we can beat China to the button. I think it’s a myth, and we should stop believing it when Silicon Valley tells that story.

JENNIFER: You’ve worn many hats in your career, actor, filmmaker, entrepreneur, advocate. How has your perspective at each intersection shaped the way you approach technology’s role in protecting and amplifying creative voices?

JOE: So I learned so much running. I mentioned HitRecord a minute ago, right? So that started as something that very much was not a startup. It was just an online community that was very small and something I was running with my brother, but it grew and grew and grew, and eventually we were a VC-backed startup.

We went up to Sand Hill Road and raised venture capital. I learned a lot about what it means to have investors and have a burn rate and be that kind of company. This is why I said a second ago, the government needs to be part of this because we can’t rely on businesses like that to prioritize the public good. They can’t do it.

They’re not set up for it. They have to prioritize their bottom line, their business interests. And if they don’t, a competitor will come in and they’ll do it. I don’t think there’s any real version of this where we shame the private businesses to do the right thing. They can’t do it.

That’s why we have laws. And look, there are laws that govern every major industry. There are laws around your food, laws around your medicine, laws around airplanes, laws around banks, laws around everything. Do you know how many laws were, I’m sure, taken into consideration when this arena was built?

Of course, and that’s good. We want those laws because we trust those laws to know that we can sit in this crazy arena and nothing’s going to fall on our heads and kill us. The reason that we can have that confidence is because there’s a law that there’s a code that made sure that that construction was done according to code.

That wasn’t a private business following pure market incentives. There’s a balance that needs to be struck. And so I feel like, to answer your question, my time sort of running one of these businesses made me all the more sure that this is a role that the government has to play. And I’m sitting on a stage in Europe right now, so I’ll just be blunt about this. In the United States right now, as I’m sure many of you know, the dominant attitude in the government is we are not going to make any laws about AI.

In fact, they’re trying to prevent the individual states in the United States from making laws about AI. And to me, this is just completely counterproductive. And again, I said this at the beginning, I’ll say it again. I’m not against this technology. I think this technology has so much potential to do so much good. But we’re kidding ourselves to think that… it will do all that good motivated purely by profits. It has to be a balance between yes profit incentives and yes private businesses and yes entrepreneurship and also guardrails from the public through our democratic governments – and I don’t say democratic as in the democratic party I mean democracy – guardrails that our governments put in place to protect the public interest.

We can accelerate and go fast and achieve great things and build beautiful things and also steer and be responsible about it.

JENNIFER: Joe, as we wrap… You talk about optimism and hope for creative futures. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for artists in this new era?

JOE: Well, I mentioned these two hypothetical kids who get to make an amazing movie. That is incredibly inspiring to me. I remember using… my family’s old video camera to make little videos when I was, I don’t know, nine, 10. And by the way, I’m a dad. I have a 10, eight, and three-year-old. And they’re making stuff now. It’s the most inspiring thing. If you ever want to get really inspired about the future, have some kids. I highly recommend it. But when you see them making things, it’s enough to get me emotional.

I want there to be a future where their creativity is valued and is cherished because what else is valuable in life on earth other than your kids’ creativity, right? So let’s not build the machine that turns us all into just numbers and products and, you know, to make the numbers go up as much as possible.

Let’s build these machines to further value and further enhance that human creativity we can do it and it’s if you want to say like what makes me optimistic it’s like there’s this huge room of people here that are all here talking about it so thank you for being here i’m really really glad to have had this conversation with you all.

I think the answer is yes, but maybe not for obvious reasons. Because it’s true that there are certain tech leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who clearly have some authoritarian leanings. I actually don’t think that’s the big problem. The problem is the business model.

Think about how a social media company makes money. It serves ads, right? So to make a lot of money, it’s got to serve a lot of ads. It’s got to hook you and keep you on the platform for as much time as possible. Okay. So what hooks people?

Is it... A video about nuanced information on complex policy issues? No, that’s not hooking anybody. We are all scrolling right past that video, and the algorithm picks up on that.

What does hook people is playing on their animal instincts. Fear, anger, tribalism, also sex, but we can talk about porn in another video.

If you have fear, anger, tribalism, okay, now go watch any speech by any authoritarian leader, whether it’s, you know, Hitler or Putin or Xi or Trump. What do you find in it? Fear, anger, tribalism.

The algorithm favors authoritarians because authoritarians are good at hooking people. And the algorithm picks up on that, whether it’s driving a social media platform or an AI chatbot. So if we want to beat Trump, if we want to not just keep our democracy, but upgrade it, we’ve got to regulate Big Tech.

Because as long as our digital worlds are curated through these predatory algorithms, authoritarians are going to keep winning. 🔴

In Silicon Valley, they’re calling this superintelligence, but does anybody really want this? I mean, you could say AI is going to cure diseases or AI is going to help strengthen our national security. And yeah, like, I want those things too.

But why couldn’t we just build an AI tool to help cure diseases or build an AI tool to help with national security? Why does it have to all be one big product that does everything?

The answer is, of course, that’s what will make more money. They want to build the product that’ll imitate a person, make you feel like it’s your friend or your lover, seduce your kids, turn us all into slop junkies, and make it hard to tell what’s true or what’s false and undermine democracy, and yeah, give rise to authoritarianism and make gajillions of dollars along the way with the most sophisticated, algorithmically placed advertising ever.

Is that what we want? Because that’s what these big tech companies are talking about when they talk about building superintelligence.

So I’ve just signed this petition called a Statement on Superintelligence that’s signed by hundreds of people that are way smarter than I am about this stuff. But it says basically this: “Let’s not build superintelligence until, number one, we can prove it’s safe. And number two, the public actually wants it.”

The very inventors of this technology have signed this petition, as well as business leaders, religious leaders, political leaders on the left and the right, national security and military people, journalists, scientists, doctors, artists. And I’m honored to have been in the first round of signatories, but now they’re opening it up and they’re inviting anybody to come sign it.

So if you are concerned about the future these big tech companies are bringing to us without permission, signing this petition is at least one small thing you could do. I’ve added a link. Come check it out.

Thanks again.

https://superintelligence-statement.org/

I first found myself immersed in the community of people working at the frontier of this technology years ago—maybe 2017 or 2018. Even back then, it seemed most everyone was excited about the potential good it could do for the world, AND simultaneously worried about its potential to do grave harm. And at the time, I remember asking:

“Hey, maybe someone should make a movie about this stuff? If it really could get as bad as you’re saying, maybe it’d be good for people to know?”

All the insiders discouraged me from doing it. AI was not on the world’s radar, and that seemed like probably a good thing. Nobody wanted it to get more hyped, draw in more investment dollars, or become politically polarized.

Then, all of a sudden, AI became ubiquitous. Everyone was talking about it. Some of the chatter seemed productive. Most of it seemed counterproductive, either serving big business interests, or serving as click bait. I went around to some of the same folks who had discouraged me years prior.

“Now should someone make a movie?” I asked.

“Yes!” they replied. Little did they know how long that can take.

I started the writing process then, towards the end of 2022. Mostly by talking to a ton of experts: people who worked inside the tech companies, people in academia, government, think tanks, lots of different people.

I asked my friend Kieran Fitzgerald to write the script with me. He and I first met when he co-wrote Snowden with Oliver Stone. We outlined a story together with Natasha Lyonne. We asked my dear old Brick Brothers Rian and Ram to produce it.

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am that Rachel McAdams is going to play the lead. I will gush more about her plenty over the next couple years, but the heart and soul she’ll bring to this is so, so crucial.

And, I’m delighted to say the movie has landed at Netflix. Biggest audience in the world. It’s exactly what I was hoping for, and I’m deeply grateful it’s coming together. Huge thanks to Doug and Dan for getting behind this project.

Even though there’s more hype than ever, I tend to agree with the common claim that AI will change the world as much as the Industrial Revolution, but way faster. The question is: will that change be for the better or the worse? And I think the answer is: we don’t know yet. Personally I don’t agree with the extreme optimists or the extreme pessimists, because I don’t think anything about this is inevitable. As my friend Michele Jawando recently said:

“AI is not destiny. It is design.”

The more aware we are about what’s going on, the more likely I think we are to end up in a bright future. I hope this movie can be a worthwhile part of the conversation. I’ll have much more to say over the next couple years as this project unfolds. For now, I’ll just say thanks.. 🔴