In the olden days, Kings owned all the land, but the serfs worked on the land without owning anything. He would have been laughed at when he was saying, “Hey, I think the small plot of land where I built my house and built my farm should belong to my crop.”
“Oh, how do you get it?” the king would have asked. “Are you planning on owning your own small land? You can little people buy and sell the land from each other?
In today's increasingly digital world, data is as valuable as land. And the lords of Silicon Valley want us to own our data more than the old king wanted serfs to own his land.
Last week, with the questionable title “Get the AI Race Summit” in Washington, DC, President Donald J. Trump was talking about whether large tech companies must share wealth with all those whose skills, talent and labor contribute to the value of highly lucrative AI products.
“You can't do that,” Trump said, “Because it's not feasible.”
I consider myself a very fortunate artist. I've been part of some incredible creative projects, but what I actually feel is the lucky one people I've been working with you. Whether “professional” or “uncertain”, “on the line” or “below”, making things with my fellow passionate artists is truly one of the great joys of my life. So you might think you hate the idea of using technology to do creative things that could only be done “manually” by humans in the past. But that's not the case. I have no issues with AI as a technology. I think some of the new creative tools are exciting. But I think we all have urgent issues with the unethical business practices of today's large corporations.
The truth is that today's genai could not have produced anything without its “training data,” that is, no writing, photos, videos or anything else made by humans, and digital 1s and 0s were algorithmically crunched and spit out as new. For over 50 years now, AI companies have cut this content in large quantities without asking for permission, without providing compensation to people who are extremely crucial to this new technology.
Justification for what I believe is a clear case of Silicon Valley theft – Trump reflected – is that a large-scale language model (LLM) is no different from people who, for example, read books and get inspired. However, this comparison is not only inaccurate, it is also dystopian and anti-human. These high-tech products are not people. And our laws should not protect their algorithmic data in a way that protects human ingenuity and hard work.
Senator Josh Hawley and Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal (Lightning Applause) last week introduced AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act. The new law prohibits AI companies from training copyrighted works and allows people to sue for personal data or copyrighted works to use without consent. In stark contrast to Trump's Silicon Valley Boot Tricking Summit, these two lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are rising to do American work against the tech industry giants. We all hope their bills pass.
Some people have faint hope that comes from the judiciary. In contrast to Trump's comments, the White House's official AI action plan does not address training data and intellectual property issues, and administrative officials said it should leave it to the courts. A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta declared victory over the issue when a federal court ruled against a group of authors who had sued for copyright violations. But in fact, the judge in that case stated that the authors probably only lost because their lawyers had made a false argument about the legal framework of fair use.
In his ruling, Judge Vince Chhabria wrote: “No matter how transformative LLM training is, it's fair to use copyrighted books to develop tools to make billions or trillions of dollars while creating potential streams of competing works that could seriously harm the market for those books.” So, if I were Zack, I still wouldn't celebrate too hard. There are still more cases pending against AI companies, including the recent first from Major Hollywood Studios, and we can only imagine that the next set of plaintiffs will take note of Justice Chebria's advice to focus on market harm.
But what if this doesn't work? What if AI companies are allowed to continue this unethical practice? Of course, no one can predict the future, but it makes sense that this will ultimately spell the end of other commercial content businesses. Certainly movies and TV. The same goes for professional journalism. The new and vibrant creator economy of today's YouTubers, Podcasters and Newsletter Writers, everything is gone. I'm not saying people won't make anything anymore. It's just that they say they can't make a living from what they've created. As long as AI companies can copy all their content to models for free and spit out quoting quotient content for free, there is no more logical business case for paying human creators.
Don't get me wrong – I think this new technology could drive a huge leap into human creativity. But only if there is a system in which people reward their novel and creative work, as it is embedded in the AI model. Without such a system, without the economic incentive for people to be creative, our media landscape and public squares are totally missing other than algorithmically refractory slops optimized for maximizing attention and advertising revenue.
As an artist like me, I may be in a future of art and creativity, but this issue actually goes far beyond the media industry. Also, the everyday struggles of ordinary people are only to achieve their goals.
Our creators may be the first to feel threatened, but everyone who works on a computer is in the same crosshairs. People who work in marketing, logistics, finance, or design. And while white-collar jobs have been influenced previously, blue-collar jobs will soon follow, especially with more use of self-driving cars and robotics. Employment as a plumber is considered safe for now, but perhaps not for our generation of children. And how do autonomous plumber bots know how to do their job? AI power supplies are trained on the data they work from millions of human plumbers. Wouldn't those people deserve some compensation? If Silicon Valley isn't going down the road. The decisions we make today are valuable work done by humans, allowing us to commit to a future where tech companies will become a fair game for hoovering and monetizing AI models.
People feel this is coming. In fact, a recent poll showed that 77% of Americans would get AI correctly rather than get it first. Of course, this sentiment is bad for business, so Big Tech responds by issuing a national security warning. Last week, Trump repeated this common Silicon Valley refrain, warning that American AI companies must be allowed to continue stealing all their data. Otherwise we will lose to China. Do you think the title of the summit is “Winning the AI Race”? Who will discuss national security issues?
But let's be real. These AI businesses have no loyalty to Americans. Their sole duty is to their shareholders. Furthermore, if AI companies have to compensate people for their data, if national security is really compromised, then in theory, should governments be willing to make up for the difference? I was dealing with the DC's lawyer about this, and he nurtured our fifth amendment, “Takes Clause.” “…and for public use, private property is not taken without compensation.” For me, it seems that tech companies should raise their pony, not the government yet. However, I think this urgency to “fall over China” is all indication that it is not a national security issue. It is a competitive businessman who wants to beat his competitors. Cash, as one great American poet said, controls everything around me.
I didn't vote for President Trump, but I think most of the people who voted for him believed he would stand up to powerful facilities and fight for working Americans. But in today's world, there are no facilities stronger than the huge businesses that build and sell AI. Nor does it pose a major threat to the widespread prosperity of Americans. If Trump really wanted to fight for working Americans, he joined Senator Holy and Blumental to build policies to protect public goods with Silicon Valley revenue. That's what he was elected. And it's actually feasible.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor, filmmaker and founder of the online community HitRecord. He recently started making an announcement.”Joe's Diary“Substack is set to direct future thrillers on Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman's T-Street AI.
