Patreon CEO Jack Conte says he’s not against AI. It can’t be.
“I run a fancy tech company,” he told an audience at the SXSW conference in Austin this week. However, the creator platform founder 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.
Conte’s talk at SXSW positioned AI as another moment in the ongoing cycle of disruptions that creators have experienced many times over in the Internet age. Like the transition from buying music on iTunes to streaming, or the transition of video to the vertical format favored by TikTok, AI will likely break many of the models that creative people have worked hard to build over the years. However, he believes they will thrive.
“I’ve learned one very important thing as an artist, which is that change doesn’t mean death. You can get up and go again,” said Conte, who created Patreon to solve a problem he’d faced as a musician: getting people to pay creators for their work.
Likewise, he doesn’t think AI companies should be able to harvest creators’ content to train their models without some sort of compensation.
“AI companies claim fair use, but that argument is bogus,” Conte said, reading from a printout of his speech, or rather, his manifesto. “It’s fake 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 and Condé Nast and Vox and Warner Music.”
If the AI companies’ argument around fair use were legitimate and valid, then they wouldn’t be paying these big rights holders, he noted.
“If it’s legal to just use it, why pay?” he asked rhetorically. “Why should we pay them and not the creators — not the millions of illustrators, musicians and writers — whose work has been consumed by these models to build hundreds of billions of dollars in value for these companies?”
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that Conte would like to leverage some of those payouts for Patreon’s community of creators, too. And he uses Patreon’s scale as a creator community filled with 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 because he is against AI or technology or even against change.
“I accept the inevitability of change and feel committed to discovering my next path in the chaos. Part of this challenge even excites me,” Conte said. “However, AI companies should pay creators for our work, not because the technology is bad — but because a lot of it is good, or will be soon — and it will be the future. And when we design for the future of humanity, we should also design for the artists in society, not just for their sake, but for the sake of all of us.”
The speech ended on a hopeful note, with Conte expressing his belief that people will be doing and enjoying other people’s work for a long time to come, despite whatever progress AI makes on that front.
“Great artists don’t replicate what’s already there,” Conte said, referring to the ability of large language models (LLMs) to predict appropriate performance. “They stand on the shoulders of giants. They push civilization forward.”
