Illustrators have spent years sounding the alarm about generative artificial intelligence startups training their models on artists’ work without permission. They’ve pointed out how the practice is tantamount to theft, and in response, many gen AI boosters have argued that it’s necessary for the technology’s evolution. This has led to contentious legal battles, but it’s also given rise to a new wave of AI startups like Pippa that market their services as being more ethical than the competition.
Like most companies selling access to text-to-video models, Pippa’s main product is short bursts of user-generated footage that can be cobbled together to tell visual stories. But what sets Pippa apart from other players in the gen AI video space is the way its business model is designed to pay artists directly. Every time a Pippa subscriber generates an image or a video clip whose style is derived from a human artist’s work, that artist is compensated by the platform.
Pippa’s cofounders, Hogan Shrum and Sean Wright, think that their focus on working with artists is what will attract customers. They also believe that their company will prove that AI firms can generate content ethically. But Pippa faces an uphill battle as it seeks to convince artists. Even as it tries to create an ethical spin on AI video generation, the company is still getting off the ground with the same sloppy models that other text-to-video services offer.
When I recently spoke with Shrum and Wright, they told me that they see Pippa as a way to move forward from “the bloody history that the AI industry has been built on.” The duo want to set an example for their peers and show the public how AI companies don’t necessarily have to steal to make their products work.
“All of these models from the past 18 months have been trained on real people’s art without their permission — that’s how it was built,” Wright said. “I harken it back to when Napster was a thing and everybody was stealing music. But then, Apple came out with the 99-cent song, Napster got shut down, and we figured out a different way to get musical artists paid.”
That analogy, however, may be more complicated than Wright suggests. The music industry’s shift to legal streaming didn’t happen overnight, and many artists still argue that platforms like Spotify don’t pay them fairly. Pippa’s payment system, which the company itself likens to Spotify’s royalty model, has already drawn skepticism from critics who note that the per-use rates are extremely low.
How Pippa’s artist payment model works
Pippa launched in May and currently has around 800 paying subscribers. The company says that artists receive $0.005 per image and $0.003 per second of video. The more generations a user makes, the larger an artist’s payments become, and Pippa also gives them access to a cut of a 5 percent royalty pool that’s funded by the platform’s overall subscription revenue. Subscriptions range from $14.99 to $99.99 per month, depending on the features and usage limits.
Artists interested in working with Pippa must first go through a multi-step vetting process to verify that the illustrations they submit are actually theirs. Once an illustrator is approved, models trained on their art become available to Pippa’s subscribers. The service also provides artists a profile page, which can be used to direct people to their work outside of the platform. Wright noted that Pippa gives its partner artists the option to submit their work under pseudonyms if they are concerned about being seen as “crossing the picket line.”
“We’ve had so many conversations with artists where they’re like, ‘I love this, but I don’t want to get ostracized by my community,’” Wright explained. “We’re very early in this space, so there’s some apprehension to participate in it. But we think that can change as people see the economics of how we’re paying artists and that our intent is good.”
The problem of scraped data
Pippa’s tech still involves using art that was scraped from the internet. Though the company hopes to fully switch to models that are trained on datasets provided by its in-house artists, that technology is still built with open models that the company says “have initial training on the broader set of content out there.” Put more bluntly, Pippa’s tech still involves some degree of using art that was scraped from the internet without creators’ express consent. The company’s intentions may be good, but it doesn’t exactly have a way to completely solve for the creative theft that’s inherent to gen AI.
This issue isn’t unique to Pippa; it’s something that must be considered with every “ethical” AI startup whose bespoke models are trained on information that wasn’t created internally. This is why some companies — like Ben Affleck’s InterPositive — have made a point of emphasizing the fact that they develop wholly original, proprietary datasets of their own. But that requires a lot of upfront capital most startups don’t have access to, and the end result is usually very specialized AI tools that aren’t exactly designed for general consumers.
The challenge for Pippa is that it’s trying to operate in the consumer video space, where the costs of training models from scratch are prohibitive. Startups like Pippa often rely on open-source or commercially available base models that have already been trained on massive internet datasets, including copyrighted images and videos. By building fine-tuned models on top of those bases, Pippa can offer a more personalized experience while still benefiting from the underlying — often legally questionable — training data.
What Pippa’s content actually looks like
Scrolling through Pippa’s online portal where you can watch other people’s gen AI animations or prompt up your own, I didn’t see all that much that looked very different from what you would find from other text-to-video services. Right now, the site is mostly filled with kid-oriented content that’s doing a poor job of imitating Pixar’s polished aesthetics, and nothing really looks like it was inspired by an independent artist’s hand.
This makes some sense given that, while Pippa intends to incorporate more original art styles, it still uses many of the same cloud-based models that other platforms sell access to. In the near future, Pippa plans to incorporate ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 model into its service, which may attract some subscribers because of the model’s ability to generate up to 30 seconds of video footage that can be fine-tuned without starting over from scratch. But in order for Pippa to really stand out from competitors that also offer Seedance 2.5, it will need to sign more in-house artists, which will depend on how well the company is able to pitch itself to potential partners.
Currently, the company has only signed licensing and model training agreements with four human artists, though Shrum said they are in talks to bring four more into the fold. That’s a tiny number compared to the hundreds of artists whose work may have influenced the base models. And the low payment rates mean that even popular styles might not generate substantial income unless Pippa’s subscriber base grows dramatically.
The bigger ethical debate
The debate over whether paying artists is enough to make AI ethical has been raging for years. Many illustrators and writers argue that consent is the key issue: even if they are paid, they didn’t ask to have their work used as training data. Others say that compensation is a step in the right direction, especially for independent artists who struggle to make a living from their craft.
Pippa’s approach is reminiscent of earlier attempts to legitimize music sharing, but the comparison to Napster and Apple’s iTunes may not be entirely reassuring to critics. While the 99-cent song model did eventually create a legal marketplace for music, it also led to the decline of album sales and shifted the industry toward streaming, which has been criticized for its low royalty rates. Spotify, the very platform Pippa invokes in its press materials, has faced fierce backlash from musicians who say they earn fractions of a cent per stream.
If Pippa wants to convince artists that it’s different, it will need to do more than offer a revenue share. It will need to demonstrate that its models are genuinely built with consent, and that artists have real control over how their work is used. Right now, Pippa’s fine-tuned models still sit on top of a base that was trained on non-consensual data, and that fact alone may be enough to keep many artists away.
Can Pippa overcome the trust gap?
Shrum and Wright believe that they will find more artists to work with, and that using Pippa will convince them to sell their communities on the idea of joining as well. In order for that to happen, though, public opinion about whether they really want to use gen AI would need to shift back in the technology’s favor.
Trust is a fragile thing. For years, artists have been told that AI will make their skills obsolete, only to see their work scraped and remixed without permission. Even with the promise of payment, many are deeply skeptical of any platform that claims to be “ethical” while using models built on questionable foundations. The option to work under a pseudonym is a tacit acknowledgment that participating in Pippa could be socially risky within artistic communities.
Pippa’s success will likely depend on whether it can sign more artists and build a catalog of distinct, human-approved styles that actually attract paying customers. If those artists go on to earn meaningful revenue, that could create a ripple effect, convincing others to join. But if the payments remain negligible, or if the underlying data problem remains unresolved, Pippa may become just another example of a well-intentioned startup that couldn’t overcome the fundamental contradictions of generative AI.
The company is entering a crowded field where competitors like Runway, Pika, and Stability AI are also trying to find ways to work with artists. Some have launched their own compensation funds or licensing programs, but none have completely solved the core problem: training data doesn’t get truly ethical just by adding a payout system. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how models are built and what “permission” means in the AI era.
For now, Pippa is betting that a small check and a profile page will be enough to win over at least a few artists. Whether that bet pays off remains to be seen, but it’s already sparked an important conversation about the value of creative labor in an age of machine-generated content.
Source: The Verge News