'Hijack your intimacy': Gordon-Levitt warns about AI companions

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents 'Hijack your intimacy': Gordon-Levitt warns about AI companions.

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a new role – and it's a big one. According to Variety, the "Inception" star has been appointed global advocate of human-centric digital governance for the United Nations. In a vlog interview with the New York Times, published on Saturday, he used the platform to issue an unusually blunt warning: AI models are specifically trained to "hijack your intimacy".

What does he mean by that? Gordon-Levitt said verbatim: "These models are being trained to hijack your intimacy, to make friends with you, to get you to fall in love with it." In other words: The models are trained to hijack your intimacy, to befriend you, and to make you fall in love with them.

The problem isn't the AI – it's who builds it

In the interview, Gordon-Levitt draws a deliberate distinction. The technology itself isn't the problem – it's the people behind it. People should "worry about the folks who are building AI," the actor said, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The AI is neutral – the intent with which it's deployed is not.

What this means for your daily life

What sounds like sci-fi is already everyday reality. Chatbots posing as empathetic conversation partners, AI companion apps, and virtual partners use exactly the mechanisms Gordon-Levitt describes: They build a bond that keeps you in the app longer. That's precisely what makes them so effective – and, from the actor's perspective, so dangerous. The Variety report's URL also surfaces the topic area "decline of democracy." Gordon-Levitt thus explicitly links the question to the future of democratic societies.

Hollywood meets the UN

That a Hollywood star of all people is taking on the UN ambassador role for digital governance is unusual – but hardly accidental. In recent years, Gordon-Levitt has repeatedly been critical of tech corporations. With his new office, that criticism now has an official megaphone on the international stage.