Jack Conte, the CEO of creator subscriptions platform Patreon, has a bone to pick with the Big Tech AI models.
It’s about compensation.
“The creator economy is being left out, loudly and notably,” Conte told Business Insider in an interview. “And by the creator economy, I don’t mean companies, I don’t mean Patreon. I mean creators.”
While AI companies like OpenAI and Meta are striking deals to license content from traditional media companies, “none of that infrastructure exists for independent creators,” 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 key problem is that Big Tech companies don’t have much of an incentive to pay individual creators right now.
“I’m heavily in favor of some type of regulation that protects the rights holders and creators who are unable to protect themselves and go to the table with a bunch of leverage in moments like this,” he said.
AI’s standing under existing copyright law is still being assessed in real time. For example, in 2025, a federal court in California ruled that Anthropic’s training of its models on copyrighted books could be considered “fair use” if the material was lawfully obtained. Still, the AI company agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to the author plaintiffs in the case after the judge ruled that copying and storing pirated books without consent did not meet the criteria for fair use. In January, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress to address transparency around how AI companies train on copyrighted material.
Conte wants to see AI companies start taking creators — and the rights to their content — seriously.
“I’m not anti-AI,” he said.
Patreon, a creator economy unicorn startup, has been internally using AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor.
“I think it’s going to help humans make really beautiful things and be really self-expressive in an amazing way, just like synthesizers, just like sound and picture with movies,” Conte said. “But that doesn’t give people carte blanche to roll it out in a way that just creates a bloodbath for the world’s creative people.”
Conte doesn’t have a solution in mind yet for how creators should be compensated by companies training AI models.
“What we need to solve for is what the spirit of IP is solving for, which is how do you incentivize novelty creation?” he said.
He pointed to YouTube’s rights management system, Content ID, as a potential model. Content ID lets rights holders detect, remove, and monetize YouTube videos that feature their copyrighted work.
“Either I can remove my work from the training data, or I get paid when it’s used as training data and when it’s replicated, and I get credit for that,” Conte said. “I don’t know how to build that, but humans have done harder things.”
AI companies could start — and potentially already are — ripping a page out of social media’s playbook for paying or courting creators. Last year, Bloomberg reported that several AI companies were paying creators to license their unpublished content, including startup Moonvalley. OpenAI also recently hired Meta’s former head of partnerships, who oversaw Instagram’s relationships with celebrities and creators.
“We’re going to see some type of model emerge that compensates artists for their work,” Conte said.
