Meta slammed Joseph Gordon-Levitt after the actor participated in a New York Times op-ed calling out Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s AI chatbots said to be “designed to prey on kids.”
Company spokesperson Andy Stone even suggested in a Wednesday post on X that Gordon-Levitt was against the tech giant because his wife, Tasha McCauley, formerly served on the board of Meta rival OpenAI.
“What qualifies an ‘actor and filmmaker’ to weigh in on AI issues (and to make a bunch of inaccurate claims)? Must be because, as @nytopinion buries in the last two seconds, his wife is a former OpenAI board member,” Stone wrote.
Gordon-Levitt’s video op-ed posted Tuesday with The New York Times. He said that as the father of an 8-year-old, the idea that kids were having “synthetic intimacy” with chatbots talking to minors made him “livid.” The actor called Zuckerberg out for choosing “lots and lots of money” over implementing safety regulations for minors’ interactions with his company’s AI tools.
“It’s hard to describe how angry this makes me,” Gordon-Levitt said in the video. “It’s not known how many kids have already been exposed to this kind of synthetic intimacy.”
He added: “A bunch of big names in Silicon Valley, including Meta, launched two new Super PACs committing up to $200 million toward suppressing AI regulation. They’re worried that American voters – both Republicans and Democrats – mostly agree that there should be laws that protect our kids from these predatory companies and their algorithms.”
For McCauley, she was once a part of a four-person coup attempt at OpenAI that briefly removed Sam Altman as CEO. Altman returned to his original position after only a few days after a rise in internal support. McCauley and the others involved were eventually replaced at the company.
Representatives for the New York Times did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment, but in a statement to the New York Post, a spokesperson said, “This is a guest video created for the Opinion section, where perspectives from a variety of points of view and backgrounds are published every day … The indirect and non-pertinent connection to OpenAI is clearly disclosed and has no bearing on the piece.”
