Patreon CEO Jack Conte says he’s not anti-AI. He can’t be.
“I run a frickin’ tech company,” he told the audience at the SXSW conference in Austin this week. Still, the founder of the creator platform has limits. Conte doesn’t think AI companies should be able to train their models on the work of creators without compensation, calling their decision to dub this “fair use” a “bogus” argument.
Conte’s SXSW talk positioned AI as another moment within the ongoing cycle of disruption that creators have been through many times before in the internet age. Like the transition from buying music on iTunes to streaming, or shifting video to the vertical format favored by TikTok, AI will likely break a lot of the models that creative people have worked hard to build over the years. Still, he believes they will thrive.
“I learned a very important thing as an artist, which is that change does not mean death. You can get back up, and you can fucking go again,” said Conte, who created Patreon to solve a problem he had faced as a musician: getting people to pay creators for their work.
Similarly, he doesn’t believe that AI companies should be able to scoop up creators’ content to train their models without some sort of compensation, either.
“The AI companies are claiming fair use, but this argument is bogus,” Conte said, reading from a printout of his speech, or rather, his manifesto. “It’s bogus because while they claim it’s fair to use the work of creators as training data, they do 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 was legal and sound, then they wouldn’t be paying these large rightsholders, he noted.
“If it’s legal to just use it, why pay?,” he asked rhetorically. ” Why pay them and not creators — not the millions of illustrators and musicians and writers — whose work has been consumed by these models to build hundreds of billions of dollars of value for these companies?”
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that Conte would like to tap into some of those payouts, too, for Patreon’s own community of creators. And he’s using 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 AI companies’ behavior is not because he’s anti-AI or anti-tech or even anti-change.
“I accept the inevitability of change, and I feel agency in discovering my next path through the chaos. A part of that challenge even excites me.” Conte said. “Still, the AI companies should pay creators for our work, not because the tech is bad — but because a lot of it is good, or it will be soon — and it’s going to be the future. And when we plan for humanity’s future, we should plan for society’s artists, too, not just for their sake, but for the sake of all of us. Societies that value and incentivize creativity are better for it,” he added.
The talk ended on a hopeful note, with Conte expressing his belief that humans will make and enjoy the work of other humans for a long time, despite whatever progress AI makes on this front.
“Great artists don’t play back what already exists,” Conte said, referencing Large Language Models’ (LLMs) ability to predict the appropriate output. “They stand on the shoulders of giants. They push culture forward.”