Joseph Gordon-Levitt says AI is trained to hijack intimacy

Joseph Gordon-Levitt says AI models are being trained to hijack your intimacy, and he is pointing the concern at the people building them.

The actor and filmmaker holds the United Nations' first Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance role, a public-facing post created by the UN Internet Governance Forum and announced on March 17, 2026. He is also a co-founder of the Creators Coalition on AI, which he helped launch in December 2025.

The interview is a vlog-style video published by The New York Times Opinion on October 10, 2026, and the page credits Gordon-Levitt. He recorded his answers on his phone while traveling to the United Nations to address world leaders, The A.V. Club and Deadline reported.

Asked what he fears most about AI, he objected to the question itself, saying that reducing these concerns into one sound bite of fear is one of the problems. He then named the worry he called more complicated and more dense:

Simultaneously, these models are being trained to hijack your intimacy, to make friends with you, to get you to fall in love with it. We shouldn't be scared of an AI. We should be concerned about the people building AI.

He said the companies behind those models are betting on taking over the entire economy, which he called totalitarianism, and he named the decline of democracy and the decline of human empathy as the stakes. The Hollywood Reporter and Variety carried the same passage, and TheWrap reported it as well.

Why the warning lands on AI video

Creators build with the same systems. AI characters and virtual influencers run on conversational models, and those models are tuned to hold a person's attention. A tool that keeps a viewer talking and a tool that keeps a viewer watching draw on the same models, which is why a warning about synthetic intimacy reaches the people who make synthetic people.

Gordon-Levitt told viewers not to take his word for it. He pointed to Stuart Russell's book Human Compatible and to the researcher Yoshua Bengio, and to people who work in alignment, safety and policy, calling his own reading of that material a shortcut for anyone who would rather not do it. He added that what gets called artificial intelligence is algorithmically recombined, human-produced data, and that the label decenters the humans who made it.

He has made the argument in public for more than a year. In January 2026 he joined more than 700 artists, writers and creators, among them Scarlett Johansson and Cate Blanchett, in an anti-AI campaign that called out companies using copyrighted work without permission, as Variety reported. Time named him to its 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

The full interview is on The New York Times Opinion YouTube channel, and Russell's Human Compatible is the first stop Gordon-Levitt recommends.