March 20, 2026 Patreon CEO Jack Conte is pushing back on how AI companies use creator content, arguing they should compensate artists whose work is used to train models. He said the industry’s reliance on “fair use” to justify large-scale data ingestion is inconsistent with the paid licensing deals AI firms already strike with major rights holders.

Conte made the remarks during a talk at SXSW in Austin, framing AI as the latest in a series of disruptive shifts for creators while drawing a clear line on compensation. “The AI companies are claiming fair use, but this argument is bogus,” he said, noting that firms continue to pay organisations such as Disney, Condé Nast and Warner Music for access to content.

The tension centres on how value is distributed as generative AI scales. While AI models are trained on vast datasets that include creative work, compensation has largely flowed to large publishers rather than individual creators. Conte questioned that imbalance directly: “If it’s legal to just use it, why pay?” he said, referring to licensing deals with major media companies.

At the same time, Conte positioned AI as an inevitable shift rather than an existential threat. He compared the current moment to earlier transitions in the creator economy, such as the move from downloads to streaming or the rise of short-form video. In his view, those changes disrupted business models but did not eliminate demand for creative work.

Still, he pointed to a structural gap in how AI-generated content is governed. Current frameworks do not clearly define how creators should be compensated when their work contributes to training datasets that underpin commercial AI systems. That ambiguity is already shaping debates across media, music and publishing.

Conte also emphasised that quality and originality remain differentiators. “Great artists don’t play back what already exists,” he said, contrasting human creativity with the predictive nature of large language models.