Anti-AIPerson

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Actor and Entrepreneur

The Inception star and HitRecord founder who demanded in a 2023 Washington Post op-ed that anyone whose work trains AI receive mandatory residuals — and has kept up a sustained campaign against Big AI’s lobbying and business practices ever since.

Actor Entertainment

Wikipedia Washington Post op-ed

In his words

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.

— The Washington Post, 2023

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 Washington Post, 2023

Biography

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (born 1981) starred in Inception, (500) Days of Summer, and The Dark Knight Rises, and founded HitRecord, an online platform where thousands of contributors make art collaboratively — and get paid when projects sell. That background shapes his AI position: he is a technologist about tools and a hardliner about compensation.

Pay the people behind the data

In a July 2023 Washington Post op-ed, written mid-strike, Gordon-Levitt argued that the people whose jobs AI threatens are the same people whose work trained it, and proposed mandatory residuals for “human data producers” — extending Hollywood’s residuals logic to everyone whose data feeds a model. He acknowledged the attribution problem is technically hard, and argued that is exactly the engineering challenge AI companies should be forced to solve.

He did not stop there. Through 2025 he called out the “unethical business practices” of big AI firms in a Hollywood Reporter op-ed, made a New York Times video op-ed accusing Meta’s chatbots of manufacturing “synthetic intimacy” with minors, criticized Governor Gavin Newsom for vetoing an AI safety bill, and lobbied Utah legislators for child-safety rules, warning that hundred-million-dollar industry super PACs were being built to punish pro-regulation candidates. He also signed the Future of Life Institute’s statement urging a halt to superintelligence development, aligning with Future of Life Institute.

The nuance: Gordon-Levitt is no Luddite. HitRecord is built on remix culture, and his household knows the industry from the inside — his wife, Tasha McCauley, sat on OpenAI’s nonprofit board until November 2023. His argument is not that generative AI should not exist, but that its economics are currently a one-way extraction from the people who made its outputs possible.