Now, Hogan, for people hearing about PIPA for the first time ever, what exactly is PIPA and what problem were you trying to solve when you created it?

Great question.

And the first part of my sentence is probably going to turn some people off because there's a lot of negativity around it.

But the rest, hang in there.

It will make a lot of sense how we're different.

But PIPA is an AI-powered animation and content generation platform.

The big differences being one, we partner with artists, photographers, videographers, et cetera.

Yeah.

So what did you see that made you decide to build PIPA?

So both myself and my co-founder, active users of AI since it's come out, but we've had our issues with it.

And one of those, a big one, is that both of us have working artists in our family.

My co-founder actually has a professional animator in his family who is the lead animator for a very popular YouTube series.

And as we started looking at the content problem that AI presented for me, lack of creative control and the fact that you could clearly tell that the styles available on all these platforms were AI created and not, there was no artist, there was no human behind them.

And it became abundantly clear that, you know, we all know that AI is quote unquote taking away jobs from artists, but I hadn't understood the extent of how that all worked from a technical perspective and quickly realized that 10, 15, 20 years ago, as the internet and social media continued to grow, artists, creatives, everyone was encouraged to, hey, you got to put your work online.

You got to put this out there so you can be discovered, so more people can see your work and etc., etc.

Why Pippa exactly as a name? I mean, what inspired that?

Yeah,

yeah.

And he realized, yeah, I can create these, but it takes a long time.

It's expensive.

And it's very fragmented as far as the steps that you need to take when creating a video, right? You can go to one platform for images and video creation, but then you need to go to another platform for dialogue and voices and music and sound effects.

Then you got to go to another platform to edit it together.

So he's using, you know, Midjourney, like Higgsfield, Eleven Labs.

Like, what are your final thoughts on like made by AI will mean by the next generation for creators?

So how does Pipa compete with them? How do artists even, independent artists, how do they compete with that if it's getting to the point where it's maybe even better than artists.

Yeah, so I think you're talking about the Cully Hill Boys that just released.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, and it's so interesting you brought that up.

So one, I think...

The reason I say it's interesting you brought that up is we're in some conversations with a couple producer, director, writers out of Hollywood that are fairly well known.

Still part of that sort of small group that sees AI as an opportunity, not as an existential threat across the board.

How does that work?