Joseph Gordon Levitt has enjoyed a great acting career for a long time, but he has not lost interest in connecting with his fans on a more meaningful level.
2005, 500 days in summer The actor has launched HitRecord, an Emmy-winning online creator forum, with hundreds of thousands of members. There he shared art with the audience and invited them to work together.
This type of interaction doesn’t happen very often with celebrities and their fans these days. Gordon-Levitt says that social media’s ever-changing algorithms are responsible. They sucked out the community elements from the online world and instead encouraged them to attract attention.
So this year he started his free Sacak newsletter, Joe’s diary. [and] The end of civilization “reached directly into your email inbox. He spoke to Yahoo Entertainment about his pivot, his crusades to protect artists from AI, and his legacy of his greatest on-screen role.
This interview has been compiled for length and clarity.
Tell us about your decision to launch Joe’s Journal.
I am extremely grateful to be able to do work in the traditional entertainment industry, but there are things I don’t get from participating in the old-fashioned media. It’s immediacy and dialogue, and direct connections with the people’s community. That’s what I’ve always worked on with HitRecord. For a long time, social media has given me it, but that’s not the case anymore.
People are angry that a very partisan person currently owns Twitter, but that’s not what they actually did. Even before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, I wasn’t involved much in social media. It’s an algorithm! How these platforms are now driven by algorithms that maximize attention, it forces [interaction] Through this lens, “Beware me! Beware me!” And it doesn’t feel good for me. I will not get the joy I used to be.
Starting this journal on Subscack is, in many ways, a return to something I’ve always loved. The oldest version of HitRecord was just me posting things. I write, do videos, make music, stories, etc. Then I always put them out directly without time and structure in traditional entertainment. Using Substack does not go through this attention-maximizing algorithm. It’s much simpler, more direct and feels like a real connection to the human community I care about.
You have a great relationship with your fans. Many artists and creators these days have raised concerns that fans may develop a side-social relationship with them, as they feel that their fans are closer to reality because of social media. Has the line between your audience changed over time?
That’s what I’ve always thought. The difference is that these social media platforms have become toxic with their algorithms.
As long as the community of people has access, I always feel really good about it. There is a boundary. I love sharing art and creativity and working with people. It’s of course very personal and very intimate, but I don’t want to feel that my personal life is a performance for the audience. I want to have my life for myself. And make mine whatever you want to call it: art, creativity, or entertainment. I refuse to call it content because I think the word is awful.
With one of your Sacak newsletters, you I wrote it How AI companies are trying to use artists’ work without paying. You wrote about it Washington Post in 2023 Same thing. Do you think there was progress there?
Yes, there have been progress. This means that these companies have been sued over and over again by people whose data was stolen. The lawsuit has not yet been decided, so we will confirm what the court says.
In the meantime, much of it also relates to people who just know how technology actually works. I hear the term artificial intelligence and hear that these companies have found a way to make some kind of robotic god who is intelligent and can do all the amazing things. But that’s not what’s actually going on. The large amount of data generated by people is sucked into these AI models, which readjust the numbers and generate these outputs probabilistically. There is no intelligence other than the intelligence that humans possess. That data was stolen.
I feel that the little bit of what I can play is trying to help people know what’s actually going on. Because when you tell people that it’s going on, they say, “Oh, common sense! Obviously, people deserve compensation and if they’re using theirs, they deserve their consent!”
This isn’t just about films and entertainment, as there will be so much work in the future. everyone Jobs – are influenced by this same principle. If humans do something valuable, do they deserve to compensate for it? Or these huge tech companies with the largest computer clusters take whatever humans have done and suck them up into AI models, saying, “Well, now we can make money and we don’t have to pay!”
It was your film that spent a lot of time posting on the internet during your early career as a writer. 500 days in summer. It flips the script in a regular ROM-COM, making people think deeply about their expectations of love. Do you think the film’s legacy has been gone for years?
I love that movie. That’s one of my favorite things I’ve done up until now. That’s one of several projects I’ve got to be part of what I’m still driving people a lot. And it certainly moved me – not just because I was there! I have experienced a broken heart in my life before, and I think many of us do. It’s easy to blame others. For me, lessons 500 days in summer That means you have to see yourself. What’s going on? What might you need to grow, rather than point your finger at the person who abandoned you? Of course, the irony is that people still come to me and say, “It’s so bad she’s abandoning you that summer!” I always say to them, “Tom deserves everything he gets, so look at it again!”
