Joseph Gordon-Levitt has long enjoyed a stellar acting career, but he hasn’t lost interest in connecting with his fans on a more meaningful level.
In 2005, the 500 Days of Summer actor launched HitRecord, an Emmy-winning online creator forum with hundreds of thousands of members. There, he shared art with his audience and invited them to collaborate.
That kind of interaction doesn’t happen much these days with celebrities and their fans, and Gordon-Levitt says social media’s ever-changing algorithms are to blame. They’ve sucked the community element out of the online world, instead incentivizing attention-grabbing.
That’s why he started his free Substack newsletter, Joe’s Journal, this year — so people can get his musings about “media, technology, creativity [and] the end of civilization” delivered directly to their email inboxes. He spoke to Yahoo Entertainment about his pivot, his crusade to protect artists from AI and the legacy of his biggest onscreen role.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your decision to launch Joe’s Journal.
I’m super grateful I get to do the work that I do in the traditional entertainment industry, but there is something you don’t get from participating in old-school media — an immediacy and interactivity and direct connection to a community of people. That’s what I was always working toward with HitRecord. For a long time, social media gave that to me, but it doesn’t anymore.
People are upset that a very partisan person now owns Twitter, but that’s not actually what’s done it. I’ve been less and less involved with social media since before Elon Musk acquired Twitter. It’s the algorithms! The way these platforms are now driven by attention-maximizing algorithms, it forces [interaction] through this lens of, “Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me!” And that doesn’t feel good to me. I don’t get the joy out of it that I used to.
Starting this journal on Substack is, in a lot of ways, a return to what I’ve always loved doing. The earliest version of HitRecord was me just posting things: I would write, or do videos, or make little pieces of music or stories or whatever. Then I’d just get them out directly without all the time and structure in traditional entertainment. With Substack, you’re not going through this attention-maximizing algorithm. It’s much simpler and more direct and feels like a genuine connection to a community of human beings that I care about.
You have a lovely relationship with your fans. A lot of artists and creators these days have raised concerns that their fans might develop parasocial relationships with them, feeling closer to them than they are in reality because of social media. Have your boundaries with your audience changed over time?
It’s something I’ve always thought about. The difference is that now that these social media platforms have become toxic with their algorithms.
As far as being accessible to a community of people, I’ve always felt really good about that. There are boundaries. I love sharing art and creativity and collaborating on stuff with people. That’s of course very personal and very intimate, but I never want to feel like my personal life is a performance for an audience. I want to have my personal life for myself, and then I make my stuff, whatever you want to call it: art, creativity or entertainment. I just refuse to call it content because I think that word is gross.
In one of your Substack newsletters, you wrote about how AI companies are trying to use the work of artists without paying them for it. You wrote about that for the Washington Post in 2023 as well. Do you think any progress has been made there?
Yes, there has been progress — namely that these companies have just been sued over and over again by the people whose data they’ve stolen. None of the lawsuits have been decided yet, so we’ll see what the courts say.
In the meantime, a lot of it also has to do with people just being aware of how technology actually works. You hear the words artificial intelligence, and what it sounds like that these companies figured out how to make some kind of robot god that’s intelligent and can do all these things that are amazing. But that’s not actually what’s happening. A ton of data that is produced by people are just sucked into these AI models, then the models rejigger the numbers and probabilistically generate these outputs. There’s no intelligence there other than the intelligence that humans had, whose data got stolen.
I feel like whatever small part I can play is trying to help people know what’s actually happening, because once you tell people that’s what’s happening, they’re like, “Oh! Common sense! Obviously, people deserve compensation and to give their consent if they’re using their stuff!”
This is about so much more than just movies and entertainment because so many jobs in the future — maybe even everyone’s jobs — will be impacted by this same principle. If a human does something valuable, do they deserve to be compensated for it? Or are these gigantic tech companies who have the biggest computer clusters just allowed to take whatever the human did and suck it into their AI model and say, “Oh well, now we get to make money and we don’t have to pay!”
Something I spent a lot of time posting about on the internet in my early career as a writer was your movie 500 Days of Summer. It flips the script on the usual rom-com and makes people think deeply about their expectations for love. What do you think the movie’s legacy is after all these years?
I love that movie. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever gotten to do. It’s one of a handful of projects that I got to be a part of that still moves people a lot. And it moved me, for sure — not just because I was in it! I’ve experienced heartbreak before in my life, and I think so many of us do. It’s easy to blame the other person. To me, the lesson of 500 Days of Summer is that you have to look at yourself. What’s going on with you? What are the things that you maybe need to grow up about, rather than pointing the finger at whoever dumped you? The irony is, of course, that people still come up to me and say, “That Summer, she’s so terrible for dumping you!” I always say to them, “Watch it again, because Tom deserves everything he got!”
