Joseph Gordon-Levitt: A.I. Should Pay Out Residuals — and Not Just to Actors

It’s not just actors and writers who deserve residuals when their work is used as training data for AI. If you ask Joseph Gordon-Levitt, everyone should be entitled to a cut if AI creates something based on something a human created.

Gordon-Levitt in an op-ed The Washington Post published on Wednesday tied one of the key fights at the heart of the SAG-AFTRA strike to society at large, saying that it’s not just actors and writers who are getting cut out of money and opportunities but that “doctors, engineers or pretty much anyone whose work involves a computer” is at risk of losing their job to artificial intelligence.

“AI can’t do our jobs yet, but it might be able to soon,” he wrote. “And people whose jobs are threatened by AI will be the same people who produced the data used to train it. A new kind of residuals for these human data producers could potentially provide some much-needed economic relief.”

Gordon-Levitt explained that generative AI works because it relies on training data, in which it models and copies whatever is fed into it, “crunches the numbers and spits out new combinations of the data, following the patterns it was trained on.” People are responsible for producing the things that AI is trained on, but only the technology companies that build these tools are seeing or are threatening to see any profits from that.

“Tech giants, entertainment giants and every other profit-hungry giant will soon claim that AI can do human-level work at an astonishingly small fraction of the cost,” he wrote. “What’s behind the curtain of AI? The cost of the human labor it took to produce the training data.”

The “Looper” and “(500) Days of Summer” star conceded that putting in place any unified system to deliver residuals to everyone whose work is trained on an AI model would be “a tall order.”

“An AI system would have to track every piece of its training data, and then be able to determine which of those pieces influenced any given output generated and to what degree,” he said. “On top of that, each of those pieces of data would have to be attributed to a verified human or set of humans, and there would need to be a channel of payment for those humans to receive their residuals,” he added in the op-ed.”

For that reason, Gordon-Levitt in a subsequent interview on MSNBC on Wednesday said a labor union like SAG-AFTRA or the WGA alone cannot be responsible for solving the problem of AI but that it should be addressed in legislation at the federal levels. Though he’s encouraged to see issues around AI gaining traction among lawmakers, he hopes the issues of residuals and payment are among the facets addressed.

Read his full op-ed here.

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