Is paying artists enough to convince them to embrace AI?

AICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportIs paying artists enough to convince them to embrace AI?Pippa is trying to entice artists with a revenue share system.by Charles Pulliam-MooreCloseCharles Pulliam-MooreFilm & TV ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Charles Pulliam-MooreAug 2, 2026, 1:00 PM UTCLinkShareGift Image: PippaAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportIs paying artists enough to convince them to embrace AI?Pippa is trying to entice artists with a revenue share system.by Charles Pulliam-MooreCloseCharles Pulliam-MooreFilm & TV ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Charles Pulliam-MooreAug 2, 2026, 1:00 PM UTCLinkShareGiftCharles Pulliam-MooreCloseCharles Pulliam-MoorePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Charles Pulliam-Moore is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.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.A shot from a video created with Pippa. Image: PippaWhen 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.”RelatedBespoke AI models are the next big thing in filmmakingArtists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winningBespoke AI models are the next big thing in filmmakingPippa’s payments to artists aren’t very large on an individual basis — especially when you