The first time I ever met Stacey Abrams, seven years ago, I was geared up to ask her about the current state of the Democratic party, voting rights, criminal justice, but she beat me to the punch and started talking about…movies. And not just any movies, but a lesser known movie of mine from years prior—in fact, Rian Johnson’s first movie, Brick.
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.
