Patreon CEO Presses AI Firms to Pay Creators for Training Data

New updates have been reported about Patreon.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte used a high-profile SXSW appearance to stake out a firm position on AI training data, arguing that large AI companies should compensate creators whose work is used to train models. While emphasizing he is pro-technology and sees AI as an inevitable shift similar to streaming and short-form video, Conte framed uncompensated scraping of creator content as an economic threat to the creator ecosystem that underpins Patreon’s business.

Conte called current fair use claims by AI developers “bogus,” pointing to multimillion-dollar licensing deals with major rights holders as evidence that creator content has material value that should be shared with individual artists on platforms like Patreon. By invoking Patreon’s scale as a community of hundreds of thousands of creators, he signaled an intention to leverage that aggregation in future negotiations or policy debates, positioning Patreon as an advocate for direct creator remuneration in the emerging AI economy.