\n\tA long time ago, kings owned all the land, while serfs worked that land without owning anything. Back then, if a serf had said, \u201cHey, I think this little plot of land where I built my house and farm my crops should belong to me,\u201d he would have been laughed at.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOh yeah, how\u2019s that going to work?\u201d the king would have asked. \u201cIs every one of you going to own your own little plot of land? Will you little people be able to buy and sell land to one another? How are you going to keep track of who owns what? Obviously, none of this is doable.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn today\u2019s increasingly digital world, data is becoming as valuable as land. And the lords of Silicon Valley don\u2019t want us owning our data any more than the old kings wanted serfs owning their land.<\/p>\n
\n\tLast week at the questionably titled \u201cWinning the AI Race Summit<\/a>\u201d in Washington, D.C., President Donald J. Trump was talking about whether big tech companies should have to share the wealth with all the people whose skill, talent and labor contribute to the value of their extremely lucrative AI<\/a> products.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYou just can\u2019t do it,\u201d said Mr. Trump, \u201cbecause it\u2019s not doable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI consider myself an extremely lucky artist. I\u2019ve gotten to be a part of some incredible creative projects, but what I actually feel luckiest about is the people I\u2019ve gotten to collaborate with. Making things together with my fellow passionate artists \u2014 whether \u201cprofessional\u201d or \u201cunestablished\u201d and whether \u201cabove the line\u201d or \u201cbelow\u201d \u2014 is truly one of the great joys in my life. So you might assume I\u2019d hate the very idea of using technology<\/a> to do creative things that in the past could only be done \u201cmanually\u201d by humans. But this isn\u2019t the case. I don\u2019t have a problem with AI<\/a> as a technology; I think some of the new creative tools are inspiring. However, I believe we all have an urgent problem with today\u2019s big AI companies\u2019 unethical business practices<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe truth is that today\u2019s GenAI couldn\u2019t generate anything at all without its \u201ctraining data\u201d \u2014 the writing, photos, videos and other human-made things whose digital 1s and 0s get algorithmically crunched up and spit out as new. For more than half a decade now, AI companies have been scraping up massive amounts of this content without asking permission and without offering compensation to the people whose creations are so indispensable to this new technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSilicon Valley\u2019s justification for what I believe is a clear case of theft \u2014 which Mr. Trump echoed \u2014 is that a Large Language Model (LLM) is no different from a person who, for example, reads a book and takes inspiration from it. But this comparison is not only inaccurate<\/a>, it\u2019s dystopian and anti-human. These tech products are not people. And our laws should not be protecting their algorithmic data-crunching the way we protect human ingenuity and hard work.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEnter Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal (to thunderous applause) who introduced The AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act<\/a> just last week as well. This new legislation would bar AI companies from training on copyrighted works, and allow people to sue for use of their personal data or copyrighted works without consent. In stark contrast to Mr. Trump\u2019s Silicon Valley bootlicking summit, these two lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are standing up for working Americans against the giants of the tech industry. We should all hope their bill passes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThere are also glimmers of hope coming from the judiciary. In contrast to Mr. Trump\u2019s comments, the White House\u2019s official AI Action Plan<\/a> doesn\u2019t address the question of training data and intellectual property, and administration officials said it should be left up to the courts. Now, a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Meta declared victory on the issue, when a federal court ruled against a group of authors<\/a> who had sued for violation of their copyright. But in fact, the judge of that case said the authors probably only lost because their lawyers made the wrong argument about the legal framework of fair use.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn his ruling, Judge Vince Chhabria wrote: \u201cNo matter how transformative LLM training may be, it\u2019s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books.\u201d So, if I were Zuck, I wouldn\u2019t be celebrating too hard yet. There are plenty more lawsuits against AI companies still pending \u2014 including a recent first<\/a> from major Hollywood studios \u2014 and I can only imagine the next set of plaintiffs will heed Judge Chhabria\u2019s advice to focus on market harm.<\/p>\n \n\tBut, what if none of this works? What if AI companies are just allowed to keep going with this unethical practice? Of course no one can predict the future, but it only stands to reason that this would eventually spell the end of any other commercial content business. Film and television, for sure. Professional journalism, as well. The new and vibrant creator economy of today\u2019s YouTubers, podcasters, newsletter writers, all gone. I\u2019m not saying people won\u2019t make stuff anymore; I\u2019m just saying they won\u2019t be able to earn a living with what they\u2019ve made. Because as long as an AI company can copy all of our content into their model at no cost and spit out quasi-new content for close to no cost, there\u2019s no logical business case for paying human creators anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tDon\u2019t get me wrong \u2014 I do believe it\u2019s possible that this new technology could propel a great leap forward in human creativity. But only if there\u2019s a system in place that rewards people for their novel creative work as it\u2019s incorporated into the AI models. Without such a system, and with no economic incentive for people to be creative, our media landscape and public square will become absolutely devoid of anything but algorithmically regurgitated slop optimized for attention maximization and ad revenue.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAs concerned as an artist like myself may be with the future of art and creativity, this issue actually reaches far beyond the media industry. It\u2019s also about ordinary people\u2019s everyday struggle just to make ends meet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWe creators might be some of the first to feel the threat, but anyone who does their work on a computer is in the same crosshairs: people who work in marketing, or logistics, or finance, or design, just to name a few. And while white-collar jobs will be impacted earlier, blue-collar jobs<\/a> will follow soon enough, especially as autonomous vehicles and robotics come into further use. Employment as a plumber is considered safe for now, but perhaps not for our kids\u2019 generation. And how will an autonomous plumber-bot know how to do its job? The AI powering it would be trained on data<\/a> that came from millions of human plumbers doing their jobs. Wouldn\u2019t those humans deserve some compensation? Not if Silicon Valley gets its way. The decisions we make today really could commit us to a future where any valuable work done by any human being will become fair game for a tech company to hoover up into its AI model and monetize, while that human being gets nothing.<\/p>\n \n\tPeople feel this coming. In fact, in a recent poll<\/a>, 77 percent of Americans said they\u2019d rather get AI right than get it first. Of course, this sentiment is bad for business, so Big Tech responds by sounding the national security alarm. Mr. Trump echoed this common Silicon Valley refrain last week, warning that American AI companies must be allowed to continue to steal everyone\u2019s data or else we\u2019ll lose to China. Why do you think the summit was titled \u201cWinning the AI Race\u201d? Who\u2019s going to argue with a matter of national security?\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut let\u2019s be real. These AI businesses have no loyalty to the American people. Their only obligation is to their shareholders. Plus, if our national security would really be compromised if AI companies had to compensate people for their data, then theoretically, shouldn\u2019t the government be willing to make up the difference? I was just corresponding with a D.C. lawyer about this, and he brought up the \u201cTakings Clause\u201d of our Fifth Amendment: \u201c\u2026 nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.\u201d To me, it still seems like the tech companies should pony up, not the government. But I think it goes to show that all this urgency to \u201cbeat China\u201d is not really a matter of national security. It\u2019s just competitive businessmen wanting to beat their competitors. Cash, as one great American poet said, rules everything around me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI didn\u2019t vote for President Trump, but I think most of the people who did vote for him genuinely believed he would stand up against a powerful establishment and fight for working Americans. But there is no establishment more powerful in the world today than the handful of gigantic businesses building and selling AI, and none posing a greater threat to the American people\u2019s widespread prosperity. If Mr. Trump really wanted to fight for working Americans, he would join Senators Hawley and Blumenthal in building out policy to protect the public good over Silicon Valley\u2019s bottom line. It\u2019s what he was elected to do. And it is, in fact, doable.<\/p>\n \n\tJoseph Gordon-Levitt<\/a> is an actor, filmmaker, and founder of the online community HITRECORD. He recently started publishing \u201cJoe\u2019s Journal<\/a>\u201d on Substack and is set to direct an upcoming thriller about AI for Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman\u2019s T-Street.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A long time ago, kings owned all the land, while serfs worked that land without owning anything. 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