Patreon’s CEO slams AI companies for the phony excuse they use to avoid paying artists

(SeaPRwire) –   Patreon’s Chief Executive Jack Conte is weary of watching AI companies forge deals with major corporations like Disney while disregarding the countless smaller creators whose work contributes to their models.

Speaking at the South by Southwest conference this week, Conte—whose platform enables direct payments to users’ favorite creators—argued that AI companies should treat creators’ work with the same regard as content from Disney, Condé Nast, or Warner Music, seeking to reach agreements with them instead of using their material without permission.

He criticized the legal principle of “fair use,” which permits the use of copyrighted material without consent or payment based on factors such as the purpose and nature of the use, the type of the original work, the amount used, and whether the use harms the market. AI companies have cited fair use to justify using content to train or enhance their models without compensation. These firms often claim they are using copyrighted content in a “transformative” manner, rather than simply reproducing it verbatim.

To Conte, this legal “fair use” loophole is entirely unfounded.

“AI companies are invoking fair use, but this argument is phony,” Conte stated during the conference. “It’s phony because while they claim it’s fair to use creators’ work as training data, they’re making multimillion-dollar deals with rights holders and publishers like Disney, Condé Nast, Vox, and Warner Music.”

Conte noted that the large licensing deals these AI companies have made with intellectual property owners in recent years highlight a double standard. While AI firms acknowledge that some copyrighted content requires permission and agreements, the same does not appear to apply to content created by individual creators.

Over the past several years, AI companies such as OpenAI have drawn attention for the deals they’ve struck with certain content owners while fending off lawsuits from others, including the New York Times, which in 2023 accused OpenAI of training ChatGPT on millions of its articles without authorization.

In December, OpenAI, the AI giant led by CEO Sam Altman, reached an agreement where Disney invested $1 billion in the company and licensed more than 200 characters to OpenAI for use in its video app, Sora. OpenAI has also signed licensing agreements with Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker, and with Vox Media, which owns New York Magazine. In November, Warner Music Group finalized two separate licensing deals with music-focused AI companies Suno and Udio after resolving copyright lawsuits with the firms.

Conte specifically referenced these deals to underscore the hypocrisy of AI companies in deciding who receives licensing agreements. Smaller creators, he asserts, are being excluded.

“If it’s legal to just use it, why pay?” Conte asked the audience, as reported by TechCrunch. “Why pay them and not creators—not the millions of illustrators, musicians, and writers—whose work has been ingested by these models to build hundreds of billions of dollars in value for these companies?”

A Patreon spokesperson told that Conte’s remarks reflect the blend of excitement and concern the company has heard from creators regarding how their work is being used and valued in the AI era.

“At Patreon, our focus is on ensuring creators can build sustainable businesses, which includes advocating for a future where creators are recognized and compensated for the value they provide, even as technology evolves,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The fair use claims of AI companies have faced scrutiny as AI models have grown more popular. The New York Times filed a lawsuit in 2023 alleging that OpenAI used millions of its articles without permission and that its large language model ChatGPT was at times reproducing entire Times articles, potentially undermining OpenAI’s fair use argument. A trial date has not yet been set, but if the Times prevails, it could be owed billions in damages. More recently, dictionary publishers Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued OpenAI after it rejected their licensing proposals in 2024. The publishers claimed in the lawsuit that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is reducing their search traffic and ad revenue by absorbing content created by their hundreds of human writers and editors.

OpenAI competitor Anthropic also settled a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors for $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 alleged Anthropic had done—did not qualify as “fair use,” but training on purchased books was deemed a legal transformative use.

While Conte stated he is not opposed to AI in general and noted that change is inevitable, he added that humans will continue to appreciate human-created content far into the future.

“Still, AI companies should pay creators for our work—not because the technology is bad, but because much of it is good, or soon will be—and it’s going to be the future. When planning for humanity’s future, we should also plan for society’s artists, not just for their sake, but for 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