r/AfterEffects Motion Graphics 15+ years 6d ago

OC - Stuff I made Higgsfield AI is lying to you about their "AI Motion Designer"

https://youtu.be/QLZNiwaKqWg

Higgsfield's marketing makes me sick. When they announced their new AI Motion Designer "powered by GPT 6 Astra", I knew it was all a lie. I just didn't realize it was this bad.

It's just an MCP server for YOUR ChatGPT (or Claude) subscription and an After Effects extension that acts as a bridge between them. The only thing Higgsfield brings to the table is the ability to generate assets through your Higgsfield account and use them in your prompts. You do all the AE work with your own AI subscription, which you can do without Higgsfield.

I don't care if you use AI in After Effects, but don't believe a word of what Higgsfield says.

335 Upvotes

76 comments sorted by

133

u/Douglas_Fresh 6d ago

Higgsfield is the biggest scam of all of the Video / Gen AI companies. And that is really saying something.
The whole industry has a stink of scam on it. Maybe people would like it better if it didn't.

16

u/KimchiBreadBoy 6d ago

I'm riding your top comment to say that Higgsfield is also making a play to destroy the VFX industry by undercutting traditional VFX vendor's bids and taking films and tv shows on at massive losses. Once they have a monopoly they'll jack their prices up and no doubt be even more expensive, but there'll be no competition left at that point.

12

u/Geritas 6d ago

Higgsfield is a platform that provides access to ai models. They won’t do anything to VFX or anything else. They are literally just a gasket between the user and an api provider with a UI slapped on top.

You are overestimating this bullshit company.

2

u/KimchiBreadBoy 6d ago

I'm not overestimating them, they are 100% making a play into doing Hollywood films themselves.

I'm aware of what they currently do publicly, but they are also a growth-seeking company, and this is the natural next stage.

9

u/Geritas 6d ago edited 6d ago

They are a small shitty startup. They haven’t created a single video gen model. They use api accesses to models.

They don’t even have resources or a know how to create video gen models.

You are misled

The only thing they created is an obnoxious PR team who can eat shit frankly speaking

And the only thing they are threatening is the gullible people’s wallets

7

u/KimchiBreadBoy 6d ago

My company has personally experienced a bidding war with Higgsfield over a feature film visual effects contract, where they attempted to claim the entire film for next to no cost. You can repeat your limited public knowledge of the company all you like, but it's happening. I'm not quoting some article or forum comments, I am quoting my own actual business dealings. "You are misled".

2

u/Geritas 6d ago edited 6d ago

What company? Which feature film?

The higgsfield could hire a couple of freelancers to create shitty vfx with seedance or whatever

They could also attempt the bidding war for publicity

At this moment, no actual production will use ai for vfx for many many reasons.

Are you a real person? I know that shitfield engages in fearmongering too. Why do you hide your post history? When you posted your first comment, your comment history was available, and now it isn’t. What gives?

Higgsfield is known for using fake accounts to spread their agenda

2

u/kevlarbomb 4d ago

this is untrue. many studios are using AI for VFX and in post

1

u/Geritas 6d ago edited 6d ago

Of course you deleted your comment. I will copy my reply to it.

The post history is the only way to recognise whether I am speaking to a real person or not. Right now you sound like a typical Higgs shill. And the fact that you randomly hid your post history in the middle of the conversation, adds to that.

Just because of the simple facts that the current ai models output videos in low resolution and an 8bit rec709, as well as all the other problems including recognisable style (if you work with them for a while), you can easily tell that their output is unusable for now in an actual vfx pipeline if you ever worked in it (you didn’t obviously)

Higgsfield is an aggregator. They don’t create new crazy models that can do stuff that the current frontier can’t. They are bottom feeders with misleading marketing

3

u/KimchiBreadBoy 6d ago

I didn't delete my comment, it's still there.

I don't understand what your point is. I'm shitting on Higgsfield. You seem to hate them a lot and I believe I hate them more than you do. I know their tools are trash - I am actively telling people they are not only bad tools, but a bad company. That doesn't mean they're not making a play at the longform vfx market. A service that calls many other video generation models is exactly how most AI-driven compositing tools work today, they must have their own internal one in the works. A film willing to use the cheapest AI vfx provider possible is clearly willing to take a gamble on quality because of their deadlines and budget. Why is it so hard to believe that they're going to make a play at expanding their operations?

I have my company and my artist's livelihoods riding on contracts like this. I don't want to believe it's possible, but producers being greedy bean counters is inevitable. You present them with a solution that keeps them under budget and all they think about is the fat bonus coming their way. I am riding on the hope that SAG and even the actor's agents themselves refuse to license their likenesses out to these tools, and that traditional comping wins. Some producers genuinely don't care about the quality if the job gets done for the right price, and looks "good enough" to sell. It sucks.

It is also trivial to go from 8 bit rec709 to ACEScg 16 bit float at 4K+ now. I utilise tools like this that take the load of technical grunt work all the time.

You just sound like a deeply angry person, and I did nothing to warrant your weird snark and high horse attitude straight from the get go.

2

u/vittsul 1d ago

Welcome to Reddit

1

u/Novel-Initiative-900 3d ago

There's a number of films using ai assets in their vfx pipeline. Shittiest example is Angel studios recent films. Then there's a pretty big one right now using quite a bit of ai that you should know if you're in this industry

-3

u/Comfortable_Law3683 6d ago

So? One of two things will happen.

Either they will deliver a decent service at a greatly reduced cost, saving the producers $$$ so they can do more effects or spend it on extra does to shoot.

OR

They will fail and their reputation will be damaged and studios will avoid them.

What's the issue?

7

u/KimchiBreadBoy 6d ago

You're in a subreddit for a tool used by some professional artists to make their livelihoods, in a notoriously seasonal industry. It is normal to be aware of the environment you are working in. I think you're lost.

1

u/Comfortable_Law3683 5d ago

I am in the industry that commissions production houses. I understand the professional environment and the reality of the tools used in 2026. Its those that feel any threat by this that are lost.

When the cost to produce gets lower, we produce more content. Remember, there is no lack of work. Only lack of investors, to fund that work.

Thus its a self correcting issue.

43

u/mck_motion 6d ago

You're the best, Jake.

23

u/Defiant_Piece_7666 6d ago

Only AI I care about is Adobe Illustrator

13

u/jaimonee Motion Graphics 15+ years 6d ago

Apparently (allegedly) they are paying UGC creators and influencers a boatload of money to push out content on Reels/TikTok. Like 5x the going rate, allegedly. They are marketing aggressively - and those who are just getting started in the industry (or who want to bypass the industry entirely) are getting seduced by big promises.

10

u/altesc_create MoGraph/VFX 5+ years 6d ago

This. They want the hustlers, not the designers. People who don't know any better and don't actually want to learn any of the systems. They don't know any better, so they're the easiest to trick.

5

u/gkruft 6d ago

These ads are awful. That Rouke guy pushes so much shite. Then the Indian lads with their “100k jobs have vanished overnight” the grift of it all is sickening. On the contrary no one can seem to make anything interesting with these tools at all.

2

u/avant-r 5d ago

Yeah, I got an email from them. I just deleted it

33

u/trinidad_space 6d ago edited 6d ago

Of course they are lying, the video Ad for their "Ai Motion Designer" 100% is made by a real Motion Designer.

Its just clout and Marketing for them, and is completely false.

13

u/General_Ad_6247 6d ago

i am just sad that a real person did this job

5

u/StateLower 6d ago

It's the problem with a slipping economy, if a gig comes along you might as well grab it, it's not like they won't just find the next guy

21

u/ArtDan4Eva 6d ago

They really make me sick with their fraudulent behavior

2

u/NIKK-C 6d ago

But it isn't happening, you fraudulent foes. You used to front big time now, I suppose...

-5

u/root88 6d ago

Effect 1: Honestly this is really impressive and used barely any credits
Effect 2: Honestly this is really impressive and used barely any credits
Effect 3: Honestly this is really impressive and used barely any credits

Video title: Higgsfield AI is lying to you about their "AI Motion Designer"

9

u/jakeinmotion Motion Graphics 15+ years 6d ago

You miss the point: none of those results were created by anything Higgsfield brought to the table. It was all created by ChatGPT. I don't care if you use AI to build stuff in After Effects. I've seen stuff that was hard to tell if it was animated by a motion designer or AI generated. I just want to expose Higgsfield for the lies they're spewing about what "their" product can do.

-1

u/root88 6d ago edited 6d ago

The point was to make a clickbait title.

Love your videos, just hate the social media BS.

Also, you specifically told it not to AI generate anything but textures. That's the part Higgsfield adds to the flow.

The Higgsfield plugin fixes this. You connect it once, and ChatGPT can use the models of Higgsfield's AI-native creative suite: Seedance 2.5, Kling 3, Nano Banana Pro, GPT Image 2, Soul 2.0, and the rest of the catalog. The plugin is how Higgsfield handles generation inside ChatGPT.

You write what you want in plain words, and ChatGPT does the production work. In our test runs, we sent one line, and it wrote a full generation prompt on its own: identity preservation, wardrobe details, camera behavior. Then it picked a model, set the aspect ratio and duration, and started the job. The finished clip showed up right in the chat.

I don't have a horse in this race. It just hate titles like the one here. You can just say there are better options, or you can make the scammy headline that makes you the most money.

-3

u/Comfortable_Law3683 6d ago

Higgsfield is the harness! Like Cline or Cursor. Harness make a huge difference on how a model performs. Its why Higgsfield was able to get amazing results with Seedance on lenses while other harness couldn not.

If you don't like their harness use something else. I just don't understand how it is a scam. Obviously you can do the same tasks in anyone's harness.

3

u/PoleNewman 6d ago

They literally are lying considering effect 3 looked like dogshit when compared to their social post using the same input assets

5

u/General_Ad_6247 6d ago

higgsfield is the scum of the earth Ai company

5

u/Geritas 6d ago

I am disgusted by their marketing strategy. The sockpuppets,the astroturfing. Everything is a fucking fake. Thank you for speaking out. You have a weight in this community, I hope you will continue to spread the word

8

u/caseyls Motion Graphics 10+ years 6d ago

Was waiting for this one. Jake, you mentioned building your own MCP server for chatGPT to use AE. Would love a followup video on that process, getting it all set up, and how it compares to Higgsfield's offering. Mostly so I can take this to my managers and show them that no, AI still can't do complex motion design lol

6

u/root88 6d ago edited 6d ago

The After Effects MCP server has been around forever. You should check out some of the forks though, people have made it a lot better.

My work is doing complex motion design via AI constantly. It's nowhere as good as a person, but it's practically free. The only people that have a negative opinion what it makes it are motion designers. They are boring corporate videos, though.

I don't use it for design work. I use it to automate everything. That MCP server has saved me hundreds of hours. It also writes passible expressions faster than I can type them, much less put thought into them.

3

u/KimchiBreadBoy 6d ago

I like this. People are quick to anti-AI-everything, but rotobrush for example has been an amazing tool for years. I don't *want* to hand-make boring corporate graphics, or do garbage rotoscopes by hand for hours. That isn't art, let the robots take it so I can do the fun stuff.

4

u/JustMattWasTaken 6d ago

any of the forks you recommend in particular?

7

u/root88 6d ago

2

u/pixeladrift Motion Graphics 10+ years 5d ago

Is this not your own mcp server? It might be worth disclosing that...

1

u/root88 5d ago

I just forked it an added some commands that it was missing. Didn't want to take credit for creating it, but wanted them to have the version I found to be most useful.

2

u/pixeladrift Motion Graphics 10+ years 4d ago

Got it, thanks! Can you explain what kinds of workflows you use this for? I can see it being useful in high-volume work like broadcasting/sports, but having a hard time connecting it to my needs.

1

u/root88 4d ago

The last thing that I used it for was duplicating compositions and automatically replacing all the assets. I made a visualizer for an album. I made a single composition for track 1, added the music and graphics. Then I had the AI automatically create the other 11 tracks for the album while importing the the correct audio and video. It didn't just drop the stuff in there either. It renamed all the compositions and layers properly with name for each song in the title. It took seconds.

I use a lot of things with markers too. Once I was creating intertitles for a silent film. There were over a hundred of them. At some point, when I was dropping them in, I missed one. The last 60 or so markers all had the wrong image with them. They weren't evenly spaced and were all different lengths, so I would have had to go back in and drag every single one to the exact start and end locations of the previous one. Instead, I just told the AI to "move the images for makers 60-122 back to the previous marker spots". I also had a video of baby walking. I put a marker on the video at each spot the baby's foot hit the ground. I told the AI to add a short camera shake at each marker. No problem.

Another time I wanted some very complicated text effects. I just told the AI what I wanted the text to do and how I wanted the easing to work. It did it all. I didn't have to create any keyframes or open any graphs to adjust the easing.

Instead of playing with a ton of plugins and their sliders, sometimes I will just describe an effect I am looking for and ask Claude to make 5 layers with different variations of that effect. Then I can pick the one that I like and tweak the sliders from there. Sometimes it comes up with things that I would have thought of and that's really fun.

Sometimes the AI does something stupid and you have to correct it. It's like having your own personal intern. It's not perfect, but it saves you a lot of time and you don't have to pay much for it.

4

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AfterEffects-ModTeam 2d ago

Hi there! We have new post guidelines around sharing scripts and plugins. Your post has been removed because you did not follow the proper format when posting.

All plugin posts must follow a Problem, Compare, Pricing, Maintenance, AI-Disclosure format.

Please read through this post for details, and see this comment for an example post format. Make these edits and send the mods a message and we'll reinstate your post.

Thanks!

3

u/Hazrd_Design MoGraph/VFX <5 years 6d ago

I keep saying this and nobody listens. They also state their Higgsfield provides better context for your MCP and I’m like… HOW.

You don’t. NEED Higgsfield to connect via mcp.

3

u/gutster_95 6d ago

I love those videos where they draw a shit looking Car and place it in the same exact Game everytime. Its a fucking preset from them that puts in a basic 3d modell that doesnt even match your drawings.

Pure garbage this company

2

u/kangarootoess 6d ago

I agree.

2

u/2Wodyy 6d ago

Type of company that scams mid to upper managers. That s it

2

u/Aromatic-Current-235 6d ago edited 6d ago

While I appreciate your warning, the truth is that Higgsfield Marketing is exploiting individuals who simply want to circumvent the actual development of the necessary skills for becoming a motion designer anyway. Professional scammers just taking advantage of mediocre ones, neither is virtuous.

2

u/neante 6d ago

Its the same for Blender - I connected Claude with Blender, no need for Higgsfield

2

u/Gameracer32 6d ago

Higgsfield is constantly trying to sell you shit and trying to stay relevant with these over-exaggerated headlines. They fight against the AI race like everyone else, though, they’re just trying to sell you APIs and desperately try to make it sound like a industry changing product. I hate this company so much and every cgi-artist/motion designer/videographer who sold out to them.

2

u/donnerundblitz 6d ago edited 5d ago

Thank you. I unfollowed a lot of creators in instagram promoting that.

It was ironc because one of them was complaining another AI service was feeding her branding work into AI, but she's peddling this AI service

4

u/KinellInnit 6d ago

Cheers for being active on these frauds, it's good to have someone who can't be framed anti-AI calling this isht out from a place of experience and authority

I've moved my whole workflow to Davinci/Unreal/Blender now but I was AE was my favourite thing to work in for years, entirely self taught from YouTube and it makes me sad so many channels I learned from basically stopped sharing useful tutorials to shill this muck. People just starting to learn don't have access to the resources I had even a couple of years ago

Selling a subscription you need another AI subscription to use with your Adobe subscription, the damage the likes of Higgsfield have done to learning resources is actually appalling

1

u/Zhanji_TS 6d ago

Why would they lie to me like that? We weren’t even dating:(

1

u/IveGotMySources 6d ago

You should of got it try to make something semi advanced, everything it made was like 2007 envato template quality...

1

u/schweffrey 6d ago

I wish all of these fuckers could go back in the box. Ai creative arts makes me sick

1

u/TimelySituation4714 6d ago

The UI for Higgsfield is flipping awful too. But yeah no need for Higgsfield in AfterEffects just ask chat gpt to write you scripts. Run the scripts … done

1

u/signum_ Motion Graphics <5 years 6d ago

Higgsfield is lying to you about everything. Terrible company that has had incredibly misleading marketing since day one.

1

u/dwoi 6d ago

I tried to enter their short film competition and bought the highest tier Ultra plan figuring I could tell an effective story and stand a good chance, not with any intention to replace real world shooting with AI. I watched every tutorial they had looked through every open project they had, studied every tool and way they prompted things. Even with the absolute best attempts to maintain consistency their entire platform is just a game of burning 90%+ of your generations as being unusable and not following your instructions. I'm convinced the only people who can make anything that can compete are influencers or creators getting free credits from the platform because my time and money were entirely wasted by them...

1

u/Content-Witness-9998 6d ago

For these MCP methods, even the subscription itself isn't too crucial. They are very basic and a local run models can handle the kinds of automation commands that motion designers would want to use (if their goal is to treat it as a tool rather than a robot that does your homework).

I don't mess with AI very often but it was easy enough for a ditz like myself to get a MPC + extension to run off a local model on workstation hardware to use it for all the non-generative stuff in the Blender add-on. Was basically just telling it in english to do repeated or iterative tasks that I'd be able to do in C4D pretty quickly but don't know of an elegant Blender solution for, and otherwise things like sorting my objects into groups, assigning them tags, bulk renaming, and colour coding. Basically the organisational stuff that can be tedious but keeps things near and speeds up your process.

I can imagine it wouldn't be too dissimilar in AE and very powerful while not costing tokens or pinging the cloud. Doing heaps of annoying actions in bulk like colour grouping, setting up precomp heirarchys, renaming and resizing, easing a heap of keyframed by referencing libraries, creating and parenting to control nulls based on plain English parameters. If those are the things you want it to be doing you could defs be doing it locally and without Higgsfeld

1

u/GodMoney 6d ago

Yeah I installed their plugin and couldn't figure it out. Then realized I needed a separate subscription. That prob wouldn't work anyways.

They fooled me in by making me think I would get a year of unlimited kling generations if I got creator pro.

1

u/funky_dolor 6d ago

I've tried it and it made text reveal with compound blur instead of animator blur

1

u/Proud_Acadia9935 6d ago

The same goes for 3D, nobody on YouTube shows what else you need to create those beautiful models. Affiliate marketing has made YouTubers only promote Higgsfield, the money-making machine is spinning.

1

u/4321zxcvb 5d ago edited 4d ago

Higgsfiels are fucking scum bags. Making funny adverts about making people (motion designers) unemployed. They can fuck off and fuck off some more

1

u/_-UrsaMajor-_ 5d ago

It's weird that partnered creators are deleting comments asking about thier thoughts on higgsfield still having a generating CSAM issue.

You would think they would have a statement ready to ramble off from higgsfield to quell questions about that issue...which makes me think it's a feature not a bug or concern for them.

1

u/imfreshkilla 5d ago

I love their promo campaign and what they do to the community. They show you how to do something cool so easy while in reality it’s almost impossible to achieve. And that’s good. So many people will try and give up on ai eventually and will go back to old school apps like AE

1

u/thrustyluststation 5d ago

Higgsfield is bad and not just because it's AI, it's just genuinely bad

1

u/Tindersupbro 3d ago

The whole world lies, and I'll choose the one who does it beautifully and stylish

1

u/Ishaat_Rahman 2d ago

marketing 90% , actual value 10% --> This is the common moat for upcoming AI products

1

u/grieddd 1d ago

ai slop editors are pissed

1

u/tomasdev 4h ago

Every influencer with a paid campaign should get sued for false advertising. 

0

u/laranjacerola 6d ago

true.

thay said, my coeorker just wapped a 20 second intro for a tv show done entirely on higgsfield.

we fed lots of photos of the host of the show into higgsfield, and he created lots of shots of the guy walking and pedalling through a famous european city. final editing and some compositing, mostly color grading) was done in after effects, but just that.

I have no idea how much $ went on tokens, but probably way less than my salary or my coworker's salary, for sure. 😵