Joseph Gordon-Levitt Slams Gavin Newsom: “Too Scared” to Sign AI Regulation Bill

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is criticizing California Governor Gavin Newsom for vetoing a bill that would have added stronger rules for AI, especially when it comes to kids.

The bill, reported by the Associated Press, aimed to stop companies from making AI chatbots available to anyone under 18 unless the technology could be prevented from having sexual conversations or encouraging self-harm.

Newsom said he vetoed it because the rules were too broad and might accidentally stop minors from using AI at all.

However, the governor did sign a different law that tells users when they are talking to a chatbot instead of a human. The law also requires platforms to have rules to prevent content that could lead to self-harm.

Gordon-Levitt, who has been speaking out about AI recently, criticized Newsom on X. He said the governor was not being honest about the law he signed. “Claims to protect kids from predatory AI companions,” he said, but the law is full of “loopholes and legal language that’s been letting Big Tech off the hook for a long time.”

The actor said the vetoed bill was much stronger and would have forced big tech companies to make their products safer for kids. “But Mr. Newsom was too scared to sign it. What was he scared of, you ask? Well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that just weeks before the deadline to sign or veto all these bills that could regulate AI, Big Tech: Google, Meta, OpenAI launched these huge Super PACs worth hundreds of millions of dollars aimed at attacking candidates who might regulate AI.”

“I guess Mr. Newsom was scared that if those hundreds of millions of dollars were directed at attacking him, it might hurt his chances at winning president in a few years when he runs.”

Gordon-Levitt also said he still respects Newsom for some things. “It’s sad because there is a lot to like about Governor Newsom. I think he’s been doing a good job at standing up to Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarianism in this country.”

“But you know, in my opinion, the rise of authoritarianism here and all over the world originates in large part with these algorithms. These attention-maximizing algorithms that drive the social media products and now the AI products that make so much money for these companies.”

Governor @GavinNewsom failed to stand up to Silicon Valley and put our kids in harm’s way. pic.twitter.com/fnddMVUMea

This comes just after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that ChatGPT will soon allow adult users to access erotica. “As we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults,” Altman said.

Gordon-Levitt has criticized AI before. In a July op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter, he called out big AI companies for “unethical business practices,” especially how they treat creative people. “The truth is that today’s GenAI couldn’t generate anything at all without its ‘training data’ — the writing, photos, videos and other human-made things whose digital 1s and 0s get algorithmically crunched up and spit out as new,” he wrote. “

For more than half a decade now, AI companies have been scraping up massive amounts of this content without asking permission and without offering compensation to the people whose creations are so indispensable to this new technology.”

He added, “These tech products are not people. And our laws should not be protecting their algorithmic data-crunching the way we protect human ingenuity and hard work.”

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