SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 Joseph Gordon-Levitt felt well-positioned to speak up about concerns he had with the risks of artificial intelligence during its rise to mainstream prominence. The actor founded a company called HITRECORD.<\/p>\n
“I had a bit of a head start from some of my peers in Hollywood,” Gordon-Levitt said Tuesday during the 2025 Utah AI Summit in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n
Beyond being an Emmy-winning and Golden Globe-nominated actor who’s starred in such films as “Inception” and “The Dark Knight Rises,” a filmmaker, and entrepreneur, Gordon-Levitt is also a father of two young children.<\/p>\n
His fatherhood and his industry background, he said, compelled him to voice his concerns.<\/p>\n
“I actually remain an optimist through all my concerns, and I’m excited about what the technology could potentially do for me, my generation and for my kids’ generation,” Gordon-Levitt said. “But I am worried that if we go down the path of least resistance, and we allow this technology to unfold purely driven by profit incentives, without any other guardrails, I’m worried it could do more harm than good, and in particular to kids, and my kids. That worries me, and it sort of galvanized me to be speaking about it.”<\/p>\n
Gordon-Levitt said he’s in favor of the government getting involved with laws and guidelines when it comes to AI regulation, specifically as it relates to AI chatbots.<\/p>\n
While he doesn’t think the government should be “telling companies how to develop technologies,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox agrees with Gordon-Levitt’s pleas for regulation in the instance of chatbots.<\/p>\n
“The government should not be regulating the development of AI, but the minute you decide to use those tools to give my kid a sexualized chatbot, then it’s my business, and it’s the government’s business, and we are going to get involved, and we are going to tell you what you can and can’t do,” Cox said during a different panel earlier Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Gordon-Levitt in September was featured in a New York Times opinion video<\/a> discussing the dangers Meta’s AI chatbot poses to kids and directly contesting claims made by Meta CEO and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for how A.I. could be used in Meta’s universe. <\/p>\n But the actor and filmmaker Joseph Gordon-Levitt is here to point out a flaw in the technology: an apparent lack of guardrails around how the company’s chatbot interacts with underage users.\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/NIPDV32rPr<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) September 30, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the video, Gordon-Levitt cites the leak of an internal Meta document<\/a> detailing policies on chatbot behavior that has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” among other things.<\/p>\n “The language is shocking. It’s shockingly erotic, the way that this company is trying to create this synthetic intimacy to hook young users. Ultimately, what’s the business of Meta? It’s an advertising business,” Gordon-Levitt said. “The more attention they can keep, the more money they can make. And what’s a great way to get your attention is to sort of form a relationship with the users. And that’s what these AI companions are clearly designed to do.”<\/p>\n But it also goes deeper than that, with Gordon-Levitt saying chatbots risk the “bedrock of any civilization” in human relationships.<\/p>\n While human\/chatbot interactions are primarily via text, he said it won’t be long before they’re “photo-real video.”<\/p>\n “If a person’s idea of conversation \u2014 of a relationship \u2014 is formed through interactions with these chatbots, we’re headed for a civilization of people lacking empathy, lacking perspective (and) lacking the ability to really have a human relationship. And where is our civilization at that point? I feel like it could get really dark,” Gordon-Levitt said.<\/p>\n Gordon-Levitt commended Utah for leading the way when it comes to protecting consumer data, notably through the state’s Minor Protection in Social Media Act, even though the state is facing lawsuits<\/a> preventing the law from being enacted.<\/p>\n Under the law, social media companies would have been required to enable the maximum default privacy settings on Utah children’s accounts. The companies would have had to verify the ages of their users and also restrict the visibility of Utah children’s accounts, including by disabling search engine indexing.<\/p>\n This is what’s great about the United States of America, that we don’t have kings and that anybody is able to own their land and do their world work and come up. So we need sort of a revolution online, the way that the American Revolution revolutionized things, back 250 years ago\u2013 Joseph Gordon-Levitt<\/p>\n\n