Patreon CEO Jack Conte says he’s not anti-AI. It can’t be.
“I run a fucking tech company,” he told an audience at the SXSW conference in Austin this week. However, the founder of the creator platform has limits. Conte doesn’t believe AI companies should be able to train their models on creators’ work without compensation, calling their decision to call this “fair use” a “spurious” argument.
Conti’s talk at SXSW positioned AI as another moment in the ongoing cycle of disruption that creators have experienced many times before in the Internet age. Like moving from purchasing music on iTunes to streaming, or converting video to the vertical format favored by TikTok, AI will likely break a lot of the models that creators have worked hard to build over the years. However, he believes they will thrive.
“I’ve learned something very important as an artist, which is that change doesn’t mean death. You can get back up, and you can come back again,” said Conti, who created Patreon to solve a problem he faced as a musician.
Likewise, he doesn’t think AI companies should be able to collect creators’ content to train their models without any kind of compensation.
“AI companies claim fair use, but that argument is false,” Conte said, reading from a printed copy of his speech, or rather his statement. “It’s false because while they claim it’s fair to use creators’ work as training data, they make multi-million dollar deals with rights holders and publishers like Disney, Condé Nast, Fox and Warner Music.”
He pointed out that if the AI companies’ argument about fair use was legal and sound, they would not pay these large rights holders.
“If it’s legal to use, why should we pay?” he asked rhetorically. “Why do we pay them and not the creators — and not the millions of painters, musicians, and writers — whose work these models have consumed to build hundreds of billions of dollars of value for these companies?”
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that Conte would like to leverage some of these payments for Patreon’s creator community as well. He uses the scale of Patreon, a creator community filled with hundreds of thousands of people, to make this argument.
The founder also clarified that his decision to call out the behavior of AI companies is not because he is anti-AI, anti-technology, or even anti-change.
Conte said: “I accept the inevitability of change, and I feel that I am able to discover my next path in the midst of chaos. Even part of this challenge interests me.” “However, AI companies should pay creators for our work, not because the technology is bad — but because a lot of it is good, or soon will be — and that will be the future,” he added. “And when we plan for the future of humanity, we must plan for society’s artists as well, not just for their sake, but for all of us. Societies that value and stimulate creativity are the best for it.”
The talk ended on a hopeful note, with Conte expressing his belief that humans will enjoy the work of other humans for a long time, despite the progress that artificial intelligence is making on this front.
“Great artists don’t replay what already exists,” Conte said, referring to the ability of large language models (LLMs) to predict appropriate outputs. “They stand on the shoulders of giants. They move the culture forward.”
