Patreon CEO Jacques Conte said he is not anti-AI. That can’t be true.
“I run a hell of a technology company,” he told an audience at the SXSW conference in Austin this week. Still, creator platform founders have their limits. Conte doesn’t think AI companies should be able to train models based on creators’ work for free, calling the decision to call it “fair use” a “bogus” argument.
Conte’s SXSW talk positioned AI as a new moment in the ongoing cycle of disruption that creators have experienced many times before in the internet age. Much like the shift from purchasing music to streaming on iTunes or the vertical format of video favored by TikTok, AI could disrupt many of the models that creative people have worked hard to build over the years. Still, he believes they will grow.
“I learned something very important as an artist: change doesn’t mean death. You can get back up and start again,” Conte said. Conte founded Patreon to solve a problem he faced as a musician: getting people to pay creators for their work.
Similarly, he doesn’t think AI companies should be able to scoop up content from creators to train their models without any compensation.
“AI companies claim fair use, but this argument is bogus,” Conte said, reading from a speech, or rather a printed version of his manifesto. “It’s a sham because they claim it’s fair to use creators’ work as training data, but then sign multi-million dollar deals with rights holders and publishers like Disney, Condé Nast, Vox and Warner Music.”
He pointed out that if AI companies’ fair use claims were legitimate and sound, they wouldn’t pay these large rights holders.
“If it’s just legal to use, why pay?” he asked rhetorically. “Why pay them instead of 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 wants to use some of these payments to benefit Patreon’s own creator community as well. And he’s using Patreon’s scale as a creator community of hundreds of thousands of people to make that point.
The founder also clarified that his decision to condemn the actions of AI companies is not because he is anti-AI, anti-technology, or even anti-change.
“I accept the inevitability of change and feel ownership in finding my next path amidst chaos. Some of that challenge even excites me,” Conte said. “Still, AI companies should pay their creators, not because their technology is bad, but because much of it is good, or will soon be, and that’s the future. And when we plan the future of humanity, we should plan for society’s artists, not just for them, but for all of us. A society that values and encourages creativity is better for society,” he added.
Conte ended his talk on a hopeful note, expressing his belief that no matter what advances AI makes in this field, humans will continue to create and enjoy the work of other humans for a long time to come.
“Great artists don’t reproduce what already exists,” Conte said, referring to the ability of large-scale language models (LLMs) to predict appropriate output. “They stand on the shoulders of giants. They move the culture forward.”
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