Last month, amid the global freakout over AI whistleblowers and collective yet fruitless calls for government oversight, I pulled on a little black dress and called a Lyft to attend the Time100 AI “impact dinner” — part gala, part panels and programming, all very intimidating when you’re walking in as Public Enemy No. 1.
I made the list of the most influential people in the field for bringing a 2024 class-action lawsuit against Anthropic for pirating my and other books — and then, this summer, securing the largest copyright recovery in history. Other Time100 honorees included Anthropic founders Dario and Daniela Amodei (oh, hi!), along with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and more. We were on the same list. Would we be in the same San Francisco ballroom? How about at the same table?
Well, the headliners didn’t show up — but at least two of us came with guns blazing. As we finished our main course, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt gave a fiery speech about refusing to feel pessimism about AI while we still have agency. In no uncertain terms, he told a rapt audience (and those who caught the viral footage the next morning) to vote out representatives who lack strong AI regulation positions “because they’re probably taking money from some of the guys in this room. Hi, guys!”
My table whooped and clapped as most of the ballroom — the tech folks you’d expect to find at an AI industry dinner — stared, aghast.
I realized this is exactly what people need to do with their fears around AI, and precisely what the tech broligarchy hopes we won’t: show up, look them in the eye and say with clarity that we must demand regulation. And no one is better at that last part than artists and creatives — the folks who use storytelling to shape culture.
To put it plainly: It can feel as if we’re living in a real-life “Revenge of the Nerds,” powerless against the Consortium of Cringe CEOs insisting that widespread and unbridled AI uptake is “inevitable.” But the creatives — the artsy kids, to keep the high school metaphor going — are the antidote, helping everyone see it’s not over and the bad guys haven’t won. We can still vote to check them.
Witness Gordon-Levitt’s relentless campaign to break down, for a general audience, how current economic forces shape the ways AI is infiltrating our lives. Check out pop-culture examples like “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” novels like Nnedi Okorafor’s “Death of the Author” and Paul Tremblay’s “Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep,” and films like “Moloch.” My own forthcoming thriller, “Delete Your Account,” was announced to plenty of industry excitement, and beneath the twisty plot lie some important questions about originality, creativity and what it means to hang on to our humanity as a trillion-dollar industry infiltrates our lives — messages that would feel far too cheesy to say outright.
Rallying cries from actors, authors and other creatives aren’t just lip service. Research shows that narratives trump statistics when it comes to both staying power and considering new points of view. And true artists have the magical, even sacred ability to connect with strangers across space and time, to enter their imaginations and help them imagine a different future. To quote artist Jonathan Louis Dent, “We will be the architects of the pending world that will be rebuilt.”
And artists aren’t only creating in silos; they’re collaborating, exponentially growing their power. In Hollywood, the Creators Coalition on AI is gathering data, providing resources and facilitating discussion about how AI is affecting the film, TV and content-creation industries.
Just last month, philanthropic firm Omidyar Network and nonprofit Pathos Labs gathered a motley crew of about 40 authors, filmmakers, YouTubers, labor organizers and more (myself included) on the rugged Sonoma Coast, where we spent three days discussing how AI is rapidly reorganizing our work, culture and everyday life — and highlight areas where meaningful intervention is still possible. There was even a mock TV writers’ room led by an award-winning showrunner where we spitballed about the future we’d like to see and what characters and plot points might get us there. I left feeling optimistic about the next decade for the first time in recent memory.
Many artists feel exploited right now; after all, as our lawsuit showed, these AI companies now worth hundreds of billions of dollars stole our work without compensation or consent, all with the goal (in some cases explicitly) of putting us out of business. But the very thing they tried to take from us — our creativity, our drive to make something that resonates with people — is what we’re using against them in films, in books and in speeches like Gordon-Levitt’s. The nerds understand the power of storytelling, and they’re terrified. It’s no coincidence that Amazon abruptly decided not to distribute the $50-million Sam Altman biopic inches from its finish line. (Indie producer and distributor NEON picked it up and will release it on Christmas Day.)
And all are welcome in the fight. If you’re not an artist yourself, you can vote with your wallet by supporting books, films and creators that are proudly anti-AI. You can recommend them to your book club or host a screening and discussion. You can minimize your own personal use of LLMs, acknowledging that — in addition to polluting the environment, enriching exploitative tech companies and deteriorating our social and intellectual capabilities, among many other concerns — chatbots like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT only appear to generate art and writing and music because they stole the template from human artists.
Of course, you can — and must — show up at the ballot box as well, following Gordon-Levitt’s advice and voting for politicians who demand strong regulation now.
Tech CEOs try to project omnipotence when in fact they’re avoiding industry-facing events and hiding behind open letters (pretty rich for people who have the White House on speed dial). They’re straw men atop a house of cards — which means they’re more than defeatable if we vote in people who’ll regulate them.
My belief that the system can still curtail what feels “inevitable” led me to take legal action (along with co-lead plaintiffs and authors Kirk Wallace Johnson and Charles Graeber) and write an AI-inspired speculative thriller, and it earned the actor a microphone and three minutes in front of those pushing that “inevitability” messaging. The AI billionaires want us atomized and lobotomized, too cowed to call for change. But we don’t have to succumb to the fear and paralysis I see stemming from the recent whistleblowers’ warnings. We just have to show up and be loud and clear.
Andrea Bartz is the New York Times bestselling author of five thrillers, including “We Were Never Here,” “The Spare Room” and “The Last Ferry Out.”
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