Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte is tired of watching AI companies strike deals with huge corporations like Disney while ignoring the myriad of smaller creators who contribute to their models.
Speaking at the South by Southwest conference this week, Conte, whose company allows people to pay their favorite creators directly, argued AI companies should view creators’ work in the same way it views that of Disney, Conde Nast, or Warner Music, aiming to reach agreements with them rather than use their content without permission.
He attacked the legal doctrine of “fair use,” which allows someone to use copyrighted material without permission or payment depending on the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the original work, how much of the work was used, and whether the use harms the market. AI companies have cited fair use to justify using content to train or contribute to their models without paying. These companies often argue they are using copyrighted content in a “transformative” way and not just regurgitating it verbatim.
For Conte, this legal “fair use” loophole is utter quackery.
“The AI companies are claiming fair use, but this argument is bogus,” Conte said during the conference. “It’s bogus because while they claim it’s fair to use the work of creators as training data, they do multimillion-dollar deals with rights holders and publishers like Disney, and Condé Nast, and Vox, and Warner Music.”
Conte pointed out the large licensing deals these AI companies have reached with intellectual property owners in recent years demonstrate the double standard of these companies. While AI companies recognize some copyrighted content requires permission and agreements, the same doesn’t seem to be true for creator-made content.
In the past several years, AI companies like OpenAI have made waves for the deals they have struck with some content owners while staving off lawsuits from others like the New York Times, which in 2023 accused OpenAI of training ChatGPT on millions of its articles without permission.
In December, OpenAI, the AI giant led by CEO Sam Altman, struck a deal that saw Disney invest $1 billion in the company and licensed more than 200 characters to OpenAI so they could be featured in the company’s video app, Sora. OpenAI has also signed licensing deals with Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker and also with Vox Media, which owns New York Magazine. In November, Warner Music Group struck two separate licensing deals with music-focused AI companies Suno and Udio, after settling copyright suits with the companies.
Conte mentioned these deals specifically to highlight the hypocrisy demonstrated by AI companies when deciding who gets a licensing agreement and who doesn’t. Smaller creators, he claims, are being left out.
“If it’s legal to just use it, why pay?” Conte asked the crowd. “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?”
A spokesperson for Patreon told Fortune Conte’s comments reflect the mix of excitement and concern the company has heard from creators on how their work is being used and valued in the age of AI.
“At Patreon, our focus is on ensuring creators can build sustainable businesses, and that includes advocating for a future where creators are recognized and compensated for the value they bring, even as technology evolves,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The AI companies’ fair use claims have been called into question several times as AI models have become increasingly more popular. The New York Times filed a lawsuit in 2023 claiming OpenAI used millions of its articles without permission and that its large language model ChatGPT was in some cases regurgitating entire Times articles, potentially striking a blow to OpenAI’s fair use argument. A date for the trial has not yet been set, but if the Times wins it could be owed billions in damages. More recently, dictionary makers Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued OpenAI after it rebuffed the companies’ offer of a licensing agreement in 2024. The publishers claimed in the lawsuit that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is cutting into their search traffic and ad revenue by absorbing the content created by their hundreds of human writers and editors.
OpenAI rival Anthropic also settled a class action lawsuit by a group of authors to the tune of $1.5 billion in September. As a result of the case, the judge ruled that training an AI model on pirated books—as the authors accused Anthropic of doing—did not qualify as “fair use,” but that training an AI model on purchased books qualified as legal transformative use.
While Conte said he was not against AI, generally, and noted that change is inevitable, humans will continue to enjoy human-created content long into the future, he 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 said.
March 19: This article has been updated to include comments from a Patreon spokesperson
