Patreon CEO Jack Conte emphasizes that he is not opposed to artificial intelligence. As he explained during a talk at the SXSW conference in Austin, his role leading a technology company makes that impossible. However, the founder of the creator platform does set clear boundaries. He strongly objects to AI firms training their models on creators' work without payment, dismissing their "fair use" justification as fundamentally flawed.

EMBED_PLACEHOLDER_0

Conte framed AI as the latest disruptive shift in a series that creators have repeatedly navigated throughout the internet era. Similar to the move from purchasing music on iTunes to streaming, or the adaptation to vertical video formats popularized by platforms like TikTok, AI is poised to disrupt many established creative business models. Despite this, Conte remains confident in creators' resilience. He shared a personal lesson from his own artistic career: "change does not mean death. You can get back up, and you can fucking go again." This mindset inspired him to build Patreon, initially to address the challenge he faced as a musician—getting audiences to pay creators for their work.

He applies the same principle of fair compensation to AI. Conte firmly believes AI companies should not freely harvest creators' content for model training. Reading from his prepared remarks, he stated, "The AI companies are claiming fair use, but this argument is bogus." He pointed out the inconsistency in their stance: while claiming it's fair to use creators' work as training data, these same companies are striking multi-million dollar licensing deals with major rights holders like Disney, Condé Nast, Vox, and Warner Music.

Conte argued that if the fair use defense were legally sound, these large payments would be unnecessary. "If it’s legal to just use it, why pay?" he questioned. "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."

Implicitly, Conte is advocating for Patreon's vast community of creators to receive a share of such compensation. He is leveraging the platform's scale—a network of hundreds of thousands of creators—to strengthen this argument.

The founder was careful to clarify that his criticism is not rooted in opposition to AI, technology, or progress itself. "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," he said. His core demand is for equity: "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."

Conte concluded by connecting the support of artists to broader societal health. "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 ended on an optimistic note, expressing his enduring belief in human-made art. Regardless of AI's advancements, he is confident people will continue to create and appreciate each other's work. Drawing a distinction from AI's predictive capabilities, Conte stated, "Great artists don’t play back what already exists. They stand on the shoulders of giants. They push culture forward."