Patreon chief: AI companies are “getting away with” using creator work for free

Content creators should be paid when their work is used to train generative AI models, Patreon chief executive Jack Conte has said, warning that artists risk losing income and control over their work as artificial intelligence spreads.

In a video outlining Patreon’s approach to artificial intelligence, Conte said the membership platform was not using creator artwork to train generative AI models such as Suno or Midjourney, and would continue allowing creators to use AI tools in their own workflows.

But he argued that the wider AI industry was benefiting from creative labour without fairly rewarding the people whose work underpins those systems.

“ChatGPT won’t output a Ghibli film if you ask it to. It won’t let you watch Spirited Away start to finish, but it outputs images that look exactly like Spirited Away, the same animation style, the same character design, the same colour palettes, the same visual aesthetic. Because you can’t technically copyright that stuff, the AI companies are, for the most part, getting away with that,” Conte said.

Conte said the problem was particularly acute for independent creators, who often lack the legal and financial resources to challenge large AI companies or negotiate licensing arrangements.

“As an independent creator, we don’t have the lawyers or the money or the resources to fight a multi billion dollar company like Suno,” he said. “That’s why regulation is so important right now.”

He framed the issue around the “three Cs” – consent, credit and compensation – a framework he credited to lawyer Monica Bota-Moisin. Creators, he argued, should be able to opt out of having their work used as training data, receive acknowledgement when it is used, or be paid when their work contributes to AI-generated outputs.

Conte also said AI companies’ reliance on fair use arguments should not end the debate, arguing that generative systems could undermine existing markets creators rely on, including licensing.

While critical of how creative work is currently being used, Conte said he was not opposed to AI itself and believed the technology could be beneficial if deployed responsibly. The Patreon team itself uses AI coding tools including Claude Code and Cursor internally, he noted.

Patreon’s own strategy, he said, would focus on using AI to support creators in running their businesses rather than generating creative work itself.

“We’re going to leave the creativity to creators, and Patreon’s product is going to focus on the managerial and administrative tasks of running a creative business and community, metadata and media organisation and analytics and taxes and all the back office stuff that takes up a ton of time from creators,” Conte said.

The debate over whether creators should be compensated for AI training data is increasingly attracting regulatory scrutiny.

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority has proposed giving publishers and creators greater control over whether their content is used in generative AI features such as Google’s AI Overviews. Under the proposals, platforms could be required to provide meaningful opt-outs without penalising creators’ visibility in traditional search results.

The European Commission is also investigating whether Google’s use of YouTube creator content to train its AI models may breach competition rules, including whether creators are effectively required to allow AI use as a condition of publishing.

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