Patreon CEO calls AI companies’ fair use argument ‘bogus,’ says creators should be paid
Patreon CEO Jack Conte says he’s not against AI. He can’t be.
“I run a frickin’ tech company,” he told an audience at the SXSW conference in Austin this week. However, the developer platform has limitations. Conte does not think that AI companies should be able to train their models on the work of creators without compensation, calling their decision to call this “fair use” “fraudulent”.
Conte’s SXSW talk positioned AI as another moment in the cycle of disruption that creators have experienced many times before in the Internet age. Like the transition from buying music on iTunes to streaming, or converting a video to a specific format popular with TikTok, AI will likely break many of the models that human creators have worked hard to establish over the years. Still, he believes they will succeed.
“I learned the most important thing as an artist, that change doesn’t mean death. You can get up, and you can walk again,” said Conte, who created Patreon to solve a problem he faced as an artist: getting people to pay creators for their work.
Similarly, he doesn’t believe AI companies should be able to collect content from creators to train their models without some sort of compensation, either.
“AI companies want fair use, but this argument is bogus,” Conte said, reading from his speech paper, or rather, his manifesto. “It’s fake because even though they say it’s okay to use creators’ work as training data, they’re making multi-million dollar deals with rights holders and publishers like Disney and Condé Nast and Vox and Warner Music.”
If the AI companies’ argument about fair use is legitimate and sound, then they wouldn’t be paying these big rights holders, he noted.
“If it’s legal to just use it, why do you pay?,” he asked bluntly. “Why are you paying them and not the creators – not the millions of illustrators and artists and writers – whose work has been used by these models to build these companies millions upon millions of dollars?”
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that Conte would like to tap into some of those payments, too, in the community of Patreon creators. And he uses Patreon’s scale as a creative community of hundreds of thousands of people to make that argument.
The founder also clarified that his decision to call out the behavior of AI companies is not that he is against AI or anti-tech or anti-change.
“I embrace the inevitability of change, and I feel privileged to find my next path in the midst of chaos. Part of that challenge is also exciting.” Conte said. “Nevertheless, AI companies should pay the creators for our work, not because the technology is bad – but because a lot of it is good, or it will be soon – and it will be the future. And if we plan for the future of man, we have to plan for social artists, and, not only for them, but for all of us. Communities develop that and better promote that.
The speech ended on an optimistic note, with Conte expressing his belief that humans will be doing and enjoying other people’s work for a long time, despite any progress AI makes in this regard.
“Popular musicians don’t play what’s already there,” Conte said, referring to Large Language Models’ (LLMs) ability to predict appropriate output. “They stand on the shoulders of giants. They push culture forward.”
