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Patreon CEO Jack Conte says he is not against AI. He can’t be.
“I run a frickin’ tech company,” he told an audience at the SXSW conference in Austin this week. However, the creator of the creative platform has limitations. Conte does not think that AI companies should train their models on the work of developers without compensation, calling their idea of ​​”fair use” a “false” argument.
Conte’s SXSW talk positioned AI as another moment within the complexities that developers have often faced in the Internet age. Like the transition from buying music on iTunes to streaming, or moving videos into the verticals that TikTok loves, AI will break many of the models that developers have worked so hard to create over the years. However, he is confident that he will win.
“I learned the most important thing as an artist, which is that change does not mean death. You can come back, and you can go again,” said Conte, who created Patreon to solve the problem he faced as a musician: getting people to pay the creators of their work.
Likewise, they don’t believe AI companies should be able to access developers’ data to train their models without compensation.
“AI companies say they are being used fairly, but this argument is false,” Conte said, reading from his document, or rather, his manifesto. “It’s a lie because even though they say it’s okay to use the creators’ works as educational material, they make billions of dollars with rights holders and publishers like Disney and Condé Nast and Vox and Warner Music.”
If the AI ​​industry’s argument for fair use was valid and reasonable, then they would not have to pay the copyright holders this much, he said.
“If it’s legal to just use it, why pay for it?” He asked rudely. “Why do you pay them and not the producers – not the millions of artists and musicians and writers – whose work has been used by these models to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in value for these companies?”
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that Conte would like to take some of the payments back, too, from the Patreon community he created. And they’re using Patreon’s scale as a creative community filled with hundreds of thousands of people to create that debate.
The founder also explained that his decision to call out the behavior of the AI ​​industry is not because he is anti-AI or anti-tech or even revolutionary.
“I accept the inevitability of change, and I feel ready to figure out my next step in the chaos. Part of this challenge makes me happy,” Conte said. “However, AI companies must pay the creators of our work, not because the technology is bad – but because most of it is good, or it will be soon – and it will be in the future. And when we prepare for the future of humanity, we must prepare for human experts, too, not only for their sake, but for the sake of all of us.
The talk ended on a positive note, with Conte expressing his belief that people will create and enjoy other people’s work for a long time, even as AI advances.
“Popular artists don’t play what’s already there,” Conte said, pointing to the ability of large models (LLMs) to predict what’s right. “They stand on the shoulders of giants. They push culture forward.”
