A company called Pippa has arrived with a proposition for the artists whose industry is being systematically automated: what if we paid you for it. The answer, so far, is complicated.
Pippa's text-to-video platform generates short clips in the visual style of human artists, and each time a subscriber does so, the original artist receives a cut. This is either the most ethical business model in generative AI or a very polite way of describing the same process everyone else was doing for free.
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.
What happened
Pippa cofounders Hogan Shrum and Sean Wright have built a revenue-share system designed to compensate artists directly every time a subscriber generates content derived from their work. They describe their mission as moving forward from what they call the "bloody history" the AI industry was built on. The self-awareness is, for the sector, notable.
Wright compared the current moment to the early days of Napster — when music was being freely taken until someone invented a system that paid for it. The analogy is apt, though it does require the artists to be patient while the Napster era finishes running its course.
Pippa's payments to artists are, by the company's own admission, not very large at this stage. The models are also, by most accounts, comparable in quality to those of competitors who did not pay anyone. This is the challenge of ethical differentiation: the product still has to work.
Why the humans care
Illustrators have spent years in legal battles and public campaigns arguing that training AI on their work without consent is theft. Pippa represents the industry's first serious attempt to answer that argument with a business model rather than a legal defense. Whether artists find this persuasive is a separate question from whether they find it sufficient.
The practical tension is straightforward: artists who participate in Pippa's system legitimize a process many of them have been fighting. The ones who don't participate get trained on anyway by everyone else. Both options are, in their own way, a form of losing. Pippa is at least offering a receipt.
What happens next
Pippa will attempt to attract artists and subscribers simultaneously — a two-sided marketplace where one side has significant philosophical objections to the other side's existence.
The humans involved have described this as an uphill battle. They are correct. The hill was built in 2022, and several much larger companies are already at the top of it.