Spotlight didn’t just enable Kutcher to become an asset to cops—it also helped him become an A.I. guy. On the tech conference circuit over the past decade, he talked up how Spotlight uses A.I. for facial recognition, including in a partnership with Amazon Rekognition—a tool that Amazon has banned law enforcement from using, except by Thorn and similar, purported anti-trafficking efforts, after activists raised civil liberties and gender and racial justice concerns over its use. Kutcher also became an investor in A.I., for instance with his investment, alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg, in an A.I. company called Vicarious, a vague but richly cash-infused venture, described by its founder as a technology that would “let us make labor much more affordable, which would then let us all rise in society.” Kutcher followed this with his own $240 million A.I. investment fund. Kutcher once portrayed Steve Jobs, but now he has fully assumed the tech thought leader role himself. Thorn helped.
Unlike Kutcher, Tim Ballard, the founder of OUR, only recently made it in movies. Ballard started OUR in 2013 with a dramatic origin myth ready to go: claiming he had spent more than a decade hunting “pedophiles” with the Department of Homeland Security and was now going indie, bringing his “special forces” buddies along with him to save kids around the world. Ballard’s stories of rescuing children from “sex slavery”—which are often impossible to fact-check, including some shared at Trump White House events that have clearly been exaggerated—are rendered in a (perhaps even more) fictionalized form in the 2023 movie Sound of Freedom. Somehow, Sound of Freedom scored bigger audiences than some brand-name blockbuster franchises this summer. The production company behind the film boasts investors who are tight with Elon Musk (one sits on the SpaceX board). Playing Ballard is actor Jim Caveziel, who portrayed Jesus Christ for Mel Gibson and who thinks fondly of QAnon. But before the well-connected investors took interest, there was Glenn Beck.
Back in 2013, Ballard launched himself and what became OUR on Glenn Beck’s online show at The Blaze, purportedly raising $1 million for the group from this one appearance. Ballard pitched OUR as a “tech startup” too—and himself as a tech founder who, as a VentureBeat story in 2014 described him, “combs the world with a proprietary CPS data-mining software, ferreting out the worst pedophiles and freeing children enslaved by human traffickers.” (An editor’s note added in 2015 clarified that the software was actually “developed by the Child Rescue Coalition” and that OUR merely “distributed and trained law enforcement on how to use it.”) I met Ballard not long afterward, on a press junket in Manhattan. He employed a kind of tactical humility, speaking about his work as something that traumatized him and his volunteer-rescuers too, because, as he told us, on their rescues they were the ones who had to pose as sex traffickers.