LLM Paying Machine: Many AI startups and Big Tech players try to justify the theft of data and user-generated content used in LLM training as fair use. Patreon, a company designed to fairly compensate human creators, completely rejects the argument. AI corporations must pay up – something they are already doing for major journalism outlets – or face the consequences.
Jack Conte created Patreon to try and earn extra from his YouTube videos. The musician-turned-businessman is now managing a platform with 3 million monthly active users, and has plenty to say to big corporations operating chatbots and other AI platforms. First and foremost, these AI companies should stop crying foul and start paying content creators.
Conte talked about AI business ventures during a recent SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. He described LLMs as yet another transformative moment for computer technology, on par with major transitions such as going from downloading music on iTunes to streaming.
Change is not inherently bad, Conte said, adding that artists will survive the chatbot revolution and even thrive in the future. However, AI-focused corporations are doing something that the Patreon founder doesn't like at all: racking up massive troves of data to train or fine-tune their language models, without providing any compensation for the people who created it in the first place.
OpenAI and other companies, including tech giants such as Microsoft and Google, have traditionally tried to justify this content theft as fair use. Conte thinks the argument is "bogus" because corporations are signing multi-million dollar deals with major rights holders and publishers. Disney, Condé Nast, Vox, and Warner Music have already secured their "fair" compensation from OpenAI and other AI ventures.
"Why pay them and not creators – not the millions of illustrators and musicians and writers – whose work has been consumed by these models to build hundreds of billions of dollars of value for these companies?" Conte said.
The Patreon CEO is clearly trying to join the fray with his platform by allowing the community of writers, artists, and programmers to capture some of the AI-derived compensation. Conte confirms that he has not chosen an anti-AI stance because this would amount to being against technology or change.
Change happens either way, and Conte thinks LLMs and chatbots are here to stay. However, we should think about a future where artists can still be compensated while AI's text prediction machine ablates semantic nuance. In the end, the Patreon founder thinks that humans will keep enjoying other humans' work and artistic expression for the foreseeable future – no matter how complex and convincing AI lies become.