Pippa offers artists small royalties when its AI copies their style

In short: A startup called Pippa is trying to win over illustrators by paying them when its AI tools generate content in their style.

What happened

Pippa sells a subscription service that lets people type in prompts and generate short animated clips and images. This kind of system is often called “generative AI,” which means software that can create new pictures or video based on patterns it learned from lots of existing examples.

Pippa says it will pay artists directly when a user generates an image or clip that is based on that artist’s style. The company’s rates are $0.005 per image and $0.003 per second of video. Pippa also says artists can share a cut of a 5 percent royalty pool funded by subscription revenue. Subscriptions range from $14.99 to $99.99 per month.

Pippa launched in May and has about 800 paying subscribers, according to The Verge. It has signed licensing and model training agreements with four artists so far, and it says it is in talks with more. Pippa also offers artists a profile page and the option to use a pseudonym, because some artists worry about backlash for working with AI.

At the same time, Pippa says its current technology still starts from open models that had earlier training on a broad set of internet content. Put simply, some of what it learned may still come from art that was collected online without clear permission, even if Pippa pays certain artists now.

Why it matters

Artists have argued for years that AI companies are benefiting from their work without consent. Pippa is one attempt to create a payment system, similar to how music streaming pays per play (like a tip jar that fills up slowly). The big question is whether payments this small, and the use of partly scraped data, are enough to change minds.

Source: The Verge AI