AI video startup boasts it ‘ended’ jobs, gets backlash • The Register

The first rule of AI-generated job loss is you don’t talk about AI-generated job loss … if you’re the company that caused it. Higgsfield.ai, a startup offering AI video creation tools, recently generated outrage when it claimed it had caused artists to hit the unemployment line.

Earlier this week, the company bragged on X that its AI motion design tool put an end to more than 20 creative jobs.

The artists using its services – well aware of AI’s impact on the creative market and perhaps discomfitted by their complicity for using these tools – were not amused and the ensuing backlash on social media led to the post’s removal.

“Seems like Higgsfield found out today that there are lines they just shouldn’t cross in their marketing,” wrote Aharon Rabinowitz, CEO of Motion Management, in a social media post. “Celebrating the end of artists’ careers (even when their motion design tools are not actually good enough to render anyone unemployed) is just super dumb and shortsighted.”

The company’s marketing claims and the services it actually provides have been a matter of contention for several months. Online critics have accused the company of:

• Bait and switch marketing tactics, with promises of unlimited access to services like Google’s Nano Banana Pro that were followed by account bans.
• Undisclosed review astroturfing to counter negative posts on various online platforms.
• Predatory billing.
• Deceptive, explicit marketing.

As one online critic put it, “Higgsfield AI: A Company Built on Rage Bait Content, Stolen Likenesses, and Sexual Exploitation.” Another has accused Higgsfield of commissioning customers to create marketing material using unlicensed intellectual property, to shift liability for potential infringement claims.

Higgsfield did not respond to requests for comment. A message to the company’s email address for the press, cited in prior fundraising news, bounced. A message to the company’s support email address said our inquiry had been forwarded to a human agent, but no one has followed up.

The Register also asked Menlo Ventures, one of the companies funding Higgsfield, to comment. A spokesperson for the VC firm did not comment as asked but provided a media contact who has yet to respond.

Ian Hudson, a UK-based software tester and video maker, spoke to The Register in a phone interview about the backlash against Higgsfield.

“The problem seems to be that really they aren’t providing much of a service themselves and it appears that a lot of the website really is just a wrapper for other services,” Hudson explained. “So it’s doing API calls off to Google for Nano Banana and it’s using a service called Kling for the video.”

Hudson said that he became aware of the service in January because of the company’s intensive marketing efforts. Higgsfield, he said, has been making promises about unlimited usage of services like Google Nano Banana and Kling.

“But there’s no explanation so you don’t really know what’s going on,” he said. “Either something’s unlimited or it’s not, but it turns out it’s not unlimited. Really you’re not getting anything unlimited, you’re getting a quick trial of it. And then it turns out that’s got terms and conditions [that say] if you do a lot of use of it, we’ll ban you.”

Hudson said Higgsfield puts user prompts in a queue that gets delayed for an arbitrary amount of time before being routed to the underlying third-party AI service. 

“So it appears to be unlimited, but then it’s not because it’s throttling things for so long to get a result back that you get a fraction of what you could get if you went to, say, Google Gemini directly,” he explained. “So it’s not really a service that is fit for purpose.”

Hudson also criticized the company for its approach to marketing, which he said involved making controversial posts to generate attention and drama, and then deleting the posts to hide the evidence.

And he took issue with the limitations imposed on refunds. Higgsfield, he said, refuses to give refunds if you’ve used their services.

“So essentially nobody can get a refund because the only way you can get a refund is if you don’t touch the bleeding thing and work out if it actually works,” he said, “which as you can appreciate, that’s just fundamentally unfair. And this is where the credit card companies are falling down because the credit card companies say, ‘oh well we’ve looked at terms and conditions and they’re adhering to terms and conditions.'”

These sorts of complaints are rife on social media and in the company’s Discord channel. A post on Thursday states, “…it is evident that your marketing is deceptive and your service is non-functional.”

The post goes on to complain about service unavailability, unacceptable latency (4-10 hours of wait time for a five-minute video), censorship errors, and false marketing.

Hudson took issue with the company’s engagement-bait marketing strategy.

“A lot of people go ‘isn’t it awesome that they’re doing that!'” he said. “No it’s not. It’s childish and it’s unprofessional. But what they’ve done in the last few days, it said something like, ‘Our product’s so great we’ve been able to sack off twenty creators.’ Something along those lines. And because their entire community is creators, a lot of them got upset.”

Robert Scoble, an internet influencer since before that was really a term, claimed in a social media post that he spoke with an individual behind the Higgsfield influencer network last week.

“This guy is trying to capture attention in a world where none of us have any,” he mused. 

To quote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Bankruptcy, moral or financial, is pretty bad too. ®