AI video startup Pippa offers revenue sharing to win over skeptical artists

Pippa launched in May with a subscription service that lets users create short video clips from text prompts, but it tries to set itself apart by paying artists whose work informs the generated style. Co-founders Hogan Shrum and Sean Wright say creators earn $0.005 per image, $0.003 per second of video, and a portion of a 5% royalty pool funded by subscriber fees ranging from $14.99 to $99.99. So far the platform has secured licensing agreements with four illustrators and is courting several more, requiring a vetting process to confirm ownership of submitted art.

Despite the revenue-share promise, Pippa still trains its models on open-source datasets that include scraped internet content, meaning the ethical claim is not absolute. The startup plans to add ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 model to boost video quality, but its library currently features mostly generic, kid-focused clips that lack distinctive artistic flair. By offering a Spotify-like royalty system, Pippa hopes to shift public perception of generative AI and convince more artists to participate.