Jack Conte, CEO of creator subscription platform Patreon, is obsessed with Big Tech’s AI model.
It’s about compensation.
“The creator economy is being left behind loudly and conspicuously,” Conte said in an interview with Business Insider. “And by creator economy, I don’t mean corporations or Patreons. I mean creators.”
While AI companies like OpenAI and Meta have agreements to license content from traditional media companies, “the infrastructure for independent creators just doesn’t exist,” Conte said.
In a roughly 45-minute video posted to Patreon on Tuesday, Conte further explained his personal stance on AI and the creator economy.
Conte said the main problem is that Big Tech companies currently don’t have much incentive to pay individual creators.
“I’m all for some kind of regulation that protects rights holders and creators who can’t protect themselves and who have a huge amount of influence and come to the table in moments like this,” he said.
AI’s position under current copyright law is still being evaluated in real time. For example, in 2025, a federal court in California ruled that Anthropic’s training of models using copyrighted books could be considered “fair use” if the material was obtained legally. Still, the AI company agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to the author-plaintiffs in the case after a judge ruled that copying and storing pirated books without consent does not meet the fair use standard. In January, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress that would consider transparency in how AI companies train on copyrighted material.
Conte hopes that AI companies will start taking the rights of creators and their content seriously.
“I’m not anti-AI,” he said.
Patreon, a unicorn startup in the creator economy, uses AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor internally.
“I think it’s going to allow humans to create something really beautiful and really express themselves in surprising ways, just like synthesizers and the sound and visuals in movies,” Conte said. “But that doesn’t give people complete choice to deploy it in a way that only creates havoc for creative people around the world.”
Conte hasn’t yet come up with a solution to how companies training AI models should reward creators.
“What we need to solve is what is the IP ethos solving? How do we encourage the creation of novelty?” he said.
He cited YouTube’s copyright management system Content ID as a potential model. Content ID allows rights holders to discover, remove, and monetize YouTube videos containing copyrighted works.
“You can remove your work from the training data, or you can get paid when it’s used as training data and replicated, and you get credit for it,” Conte said. “We don’t know how to build it, but humans have done much harder things.”
AI companies could, and perhaps already are, starting to take a page out of their social media strategies to pay and court creators. Last year, Bloomberg reported that some AI companies, including startup Moon Valley, are paying creators to license unpublished content. OpenAI also recently hired Meta’s former head of partnerships, who oversaw Instagram’s relationships with celebrities and creators.
“There will be some model that will reward artists for their work,” Conte said.
