Joseph Gordon-Levitt Says “Residuals From AI Training Data Should Be Made Mandatory”

Etan Vlessing
·3 min read
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Actor and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt has called for residuals to be paid to anyone whose work is used to train generative artificial intelligence, or AI tools and applications.

“Residuals from AI training data should be made mandatory and intellectual-property law amended to make sure those residuals go to the people who deserve them,” Gordon-Levitt wrote in a Washington Post op-ed entitled “If Artificial Intelligence Uses Your Work, It Should Pay You.”

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“At the moment, Hollywood’s labor unions for writers and actors, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, are on strike, and streaming residuals are one of the main deal points being negotiated. I’m a proud member of both of these unions, and I strongly support their demands,” Gordon-Levitt said in his editorial.

But he argued the case for residual payments for work that trains AI tools also applies to the wider economy, with Hollywood writers and actors only serving as the canaries in the coal mine on the issue of AI tools impacting jobs worldwide. “The seemingly miraculous outputs of generative AI should not be allowed to fill the coffers of tech giants or any other giants without paying the people whose data made those outputs possible,” the op-ed stated.

Gordon-Levitt said workers in a host of professions will follow Hollywood film and TV actors and writers in having their jobs threatened by AI and its potential for economic dislocation.

“This principle holds true whether we’re talking about entertainers, doctors, engineers or pretty much anyone whose work involves a computer. AI can’t do our jobs yet, but it might be able to soon. 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,” he wrote.

Gordon-Levitt said the cost of human labor to train AI tools and applications needed compensation in the form of residuals.

“Technologically speaking, the type of residuals program I have in mind 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. 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.

And just as the major Hollywood studios, in owning the copyrights to the artistic creations of writers, actors, camera operators, costume designers, sound mixers or other industry talent and technicians, reaped the profits, Gordon-Levitt said tech giants stood to benefit the most from AI tools and applications built from human-created data pulled from the internet.

That includes AI-driven movies using digital data culled online from past movies created in Hollywood and elsewhere. “Therefore, any time this AI yields revenue, the people who made those past movies will deserve a substantial piece,” the op-ed stated.

Gordon-Levitt made the case for a new kind of residuals for “human data producers” requiring compensation. “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. What’s behind the curtain of AI? The cost of the human labor it took to produce the training data,” he argued.

“AI is going to change things faster and harder than our intuition can properly predict. Will those changes be for the better or worse? I believe we still have a real shot at a world in which our careers are both more productive and more meaningful, and in which our compensation is both more honorable and more equitable than any we’ve ever known. But that kind of bright future won’t arrive automatically. As always, it’ll be us doing the work,” Gordon-Levitt added.

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