Patreon chief called AI companies' fair use argument untenable

Patreon CEO Jack Conte openly opposed the position of AI companies that use the fair use doctrine to justify training models on authors' content without consent or payment. Conte pointed out a fundamental contradiction: if training on others' texts, images, and videos truly falls under "fair use," why then do OpenAI, Google, and other market players enter into paid licensing agreements with major media outlets—such as The Atlantic, Associated Press, or Axel Springer? The very fact of these deals, in Conte's view, indicates recognition: companies understand that they must pay for others' content.

Patreon is a platform where more than 250,000 creators earn income directly from their audience. The total earnings of creators through the service have exceeded $3.5 billion.

This is precisely why Conte's position is not abstract: it concerns real people whose texts, podcasts, and art could have been used to train language models without any compensation whatsoever.

Debates over fair use as applied to AI training continue in courts worldwide. In the United States, lawsuits have already been filed by authors, musicians, artists, and publishers. The key question is whether using content for machine learning is "transformative" in the legal sense, which traditionally serves as a basis for fair use protection. Critics, including Conte, believe it is not: AI companies extract direct commercial benefit from others' work. Among the arguments of the other side is that models do not reproduce content verbatim, but "learn" from it, much as a person learns by reading books. However, this comparison raises increasingly more doubts as models become more precise in reproducing the style and facts of specific authors.

Conte's statement adds an authoritative voice to the growing chorus of demands to create a fair compensation system. Several countries are already discussing regulatory mechanisms: in Europe, a copyright directive has been adopted obligating platforms to negotiate with rights holders. The question is whether rhetoric will be followed by real pressure on lawmakers—and when will AI companies be faced with a choice: pay creators voluntarily or by court order.