Illustrators have long criticized AI startups for using their work without permission. Pippa promises to compensate artists through its revenue share system, but will this be enough?

The company’s co-founders Hogan Shrum and Sean Wright argue that paying artists directly is key to ethical AI development. But critics point out that Pippa still uses scraped art, similar to other services.

With only 800 subscribers and a small roster of approved artists, Pippa faces an uphill struggle to gain acceptance from the artistic community. The royalty payments, while modest, are intended to show good intentions.

Their technology remains partly reliant on scraped content, making it hard for Pippa to completely solve the issue of creative theft inherent in generative AI. Other ethical startups face similar challenges but require significant capital to create proprietary datasets.