The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2026

Joseph Gordon-Levitt sees his contribution to the AI conversation as a storyteller, helping people understand what widespread adoption of the technology and the current economic structures around it could mean for them. Companies, he notes, are incentivized to maximize shareholder value. “And that’s not necessarily going to line up with the technology being good for people,” he tells TIME.

As an actor and filmmaker, he’s also concerned about how AI will affect storytelling itself. In December 2025, he founded the Creators Coalition on AI alongside others including Natasha Lyonne and Daniel Kwan. The group aims to become Hollywood’s voice at the table, calling for fair compensation, job protections and deepfake guardrails, among other things. The coalition’s signatories include A-listers like Ben Affleck, Cate Blanchett, Margot Robbie, and Octavia Spencer. 

Gordon-Levitt, who co-founded online collaborative media platform HitRecord in the early aughts, isn’t against the development of the technology itself, he says. He sees the potential for AI to empower more people. “But that’s not the path it’s on right now,” he says. “Right now it’s on a path where we take many steps back, where the power is taken away from more and more people and put into the hands of the few. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

In March, he was appointed as the U.N.’s first-ever global advocate for human-centric digital governance, where he would work with the organization’s Internet Governance Forum on promoting an approach that it hopes will be “equitable, innovative, responsible and human-centred.”

“Private companies can’t be the only ones deciding how this technology is going to be developed and deployed,” Gordon-Levitt says. “The people need to get involved. We can’t just be customers, we have to be advocates.” 

Ever the storyteller, Gordon-Levitt is looking to distill these themes in his upcoming untitled thriller. “Talking about numbers and issues and policy and technology only takes a conversation so far,” he says. “Making a feature film is one of the best ways to really communicate a human experience—what it feels like as a person to be in this new world that we might be headed for.”