Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, February 13th.

Today on Forbes, racist videos and payment problems, the dark side of this AI startup's

super-fast growth.

In late January, Tim Soret, a London-based video game director, received a message on X from

the marketing team at Higgsfield,

a fast-growing AI video generation startup. It read, quote, this is the biggest moment in Higgsfield

history, and we want you to be a part of it. The $1.3 billion valued startup, whose tools are

used by some 15 million creators and ad agencies

to churn out 4.5 million video clips every day, was about to launch a new tool called

Vibe Motion, which uses AI models to convert text prompts into motion graphics.

The offer? If Soret shared the startup's social media post, along with a video clip from pre-assembled

marketing materials, the company would pay him $200.

But Sorrett, who has spent years designing graphics both manually and with AI tools,

could tell something was off.

The videos Higgsfield had shared with

him lacked the, quote, visual quirks of AI, and he quickly realized that some clips in the

media kit weren't generated with AI at all. Instead, they were video templates that

appear to have been lifted from stock site in Vado on which the startup had paced its own

logos, according to videos and documents reviewed by Forbes. While Soret didn't share the videos,

others did, circulating the stock video templates on X to promote Higgsfield. Soret told Forbes,

quote, All this hype is fake and it's bought.

Higgsfield's co-founder and chief strategy officer Mahi De Silva told Forbes the media kit was

...