CROSSPOST: Patreon CEO Jack Conte, Interviewed by Himself & by Nilay Patel of "The Verge"
Creators hate the AI slop flooding their feeds, but every software company knows it will die if it doesn’t embrace these tools. Jack Conte’s answer is to use AI not to replace artists, but to clean their toilets, do their taxes, and wrest some power back from the AI-Borg of Anthropic & OpenAI that sees nothing wrong with saying that its terms-of-service are absolute and nobody else’s terms-of-service matter at all.
My view of many issuers around “Generative AI” has been profoundly shaped by the fact that I hear—constantly—from the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic in my left ear that:
their scraping everything to train their models without paying the authors/creators an extra cent for this previously uncontemplated use of their work is absolutely fine;
but distilling their models is worse than unfair: it is criminal.
Gizmodo called them out effectively:
Webb Wright: Everyone Wants to Build AI Using Someone Else’s Work <https://gizmodo.com/everyone-wants-to-build-ai-using-someone-elses-work-2000777781>: ‘Media companies and artists aren’t the only ones accusing AI companies of stealing their work. Increasingly, accusations are being lobbed between companies themselves…. Like publishers’ legal disputes with AI developers, the U.S. AI industry’s efforts to prevent foreign companies from “illicitly” using their models to train new ones will almost certainly not have a quick or easy solution. But one has to suspect that right now, across the country, editors at small-town newspapers are watching American tech companies complain about what they claim amounts to theft, and feeling that at last, a tiny bit of justice has been served…
The “we won’t even bother to try to make even a semi-logical argument; we will just show up with bags of money” vibe here is very distasteful.
Thus I am predisposed to be 100% sympathetic to the Patreon CEO here, as I watch Patreon CEO Jack Conte interviewed by himself:
Jack Conte: My Thoughts on AI <https://www.patreon.com/jackconte/posts/my-thoughts-on-152669616>: ‘Hey creators! I’ve been thinking a lot about AI…. This video is… a download of where my head is about AI, copyright, fair use… fear… what specifically excites me about the tech and what I’m angry about, and why I believe in human creativity…. It’s long!…. If you only listen to 20 seconds… here’s… [what] you should know:
Patreon does NOT use creator work to train… LLMs or image generators….
We ARE actively fighting to protect creators from AI spam, and from having their work scraped without their consent.
We are NOT blanket-prohibiting work that was made with AI tools….
I believe human creativity is not going anywhere…
And as I watch him interviewed by Nilay Patel of The Verge:
Jack Conte & Nilay Patel: Patreon Ceo Jack Conte on Supporting Artists in the AI Slop Era <https://www.theverge.com/podcast/952607/patreon-ceo-jack-conte>:
Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon… last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago… and a lot has changed…. His ideas about what Patreon is and how it should work have changed dramatically…. The last time we talked, Jack was adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon. But then Patreon built those features—to help people discover content from new creators…. Jack says if Patreon didn’t build its own audience platform, then everyone would be at the mercy of Meta and Google to find audiences—and customers.
You’ll hear Jack say that the current way platforms treat creators is “disgusting,” and you’ll hear him convincingly argue that big tech companies are going to just keep taking everyone’s work however they want, and writers and musicians and artists of every kind will be left holding the bag. But you’ll also hear Jack argue that this leaves a really big opportunity for a company like Patreon, which connects creators directly with audiences. In a world full of cheap and easy slop, Patreon’s plan is to build demand from real people who want to connect in deep and important ways with real artists…
Perhaps the most crucial crux is this exchange:
Nilay Patel: Every software engineer and product manager I know is either the most excited they’ve ever been or experiencing a full existential crisis about the ease of developing software, of making new features, of making new products, of tokenmaxxing. Then in creator world, the audiences hate it, and they don’t want the slop, and every platform is overrun with slop, even though the audiences don’t want the slop, and something very bad is happening.
How are you bridging that divide? Because it’s obvious that the future of software companies looks AI-enabled in some way, I’m not sure which way it is, but it’s obvious that it’s some way. And then it is far from obvious that the future of creator media has any AI in it at all, because the audiences are rejecting it so thoroughly.
Jack Conte: This has been really challenging…. I’m holding two opposing beliefs at the same time, and I’m terrified, and I’m excited, and I’m really pissed at how all this has been rolled out…. I find the technology magical…. I am holding all of these ideas in my head at once, and I myself feel very conflicted about it….
The algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps, and they push us so far apart. That is absolutely happening now with AI…. There are… serious drawbacks and concerns…. I’m… seriously angry about it…. But I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation…. Everything is changing for people, and this is going to be a transformative shift for artists, for employees, for humans….. Boycotting AI is like boycotting the internet. That’s not a good strategy. I don’t like what Instagram has done…. I still have an Instagram page…. I don’t like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year…. And here I am on my iPhone. I don’t like what my federal government is doing right now… and I still pay my taxes, and I still live in the United States….
Every 10 years, there’s this techno-legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology, and it breaks the current systems. It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim… “fair use, or copyright doesn’t apply because it’s transformative.”… Then there’s industry mayhem…. We are now… in the industry mayhem part of this cycle…. There should be a lot of lawsuits… regulation…. These models have Borg’d the entirety of the free creative web…. That is bad, not only for those creators, but it’s bad for society.…
If Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company… and use them to give the power back to creators, we, as a company, will be dead in three years…. These platform shifts are material…. Companies [that] don’t keep up with these new technologies… die. Patreon is much more useful to creators if we are alive…. We must embrace those tools… because I want us to be a powerful product company that fights on behalf of creative people.…
At the center of the bullseye is creators making their creative work. What creators have told us is, “Patreon, get the f*** out of the way….” So, we get out of their way…. One rung out… is the packaging…. Like automated chapter markers and things like that, or cutting long-form podcast episodes into clips. One rung out from that is marketing… with automated email flows and things like that. And then one rung out from that is business management…. The best quote we heard from our user research interviews was, “Hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don’t need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet.” And that is our product strategy….
I’ve explained all this to our creators in this very long 45-minute video...
Brad here again: I am going to have to think hard about how Substack and Patreon are both very much alike and very much different here.