Higgsfield's Latest AI Tool Wants To Help You Steal Any Image On The Internet

By Chris Smith
The user interface of Higgsfield Soul. Higgsfield

Higgsfield Soul is the name of an AI image generator that went viral a few weeks ago. The AI tool lets you generate images that are nearly indistinguishable from photos taken with a camera or the phone in your pocket. What's special about Soul is that Higgsfield devised visual styles that act like filters, informing the AI of what sort of AI image type you want. Add a text prompt, like you would in ChatGPT or Gemini, and the AI can produce amazing results.

Higgsfield upgraded its AI tools, adding an Inpaint tool that lets you quickly edit parts of an image. The company also lets you create videos using its AI models. A few days ago, Higgsfield combined Soul with Google's Veo 3 AI video generator. The Soul-Veo-3 combo lets you create incredible videos that are also difficult to tell apart from videos recorded with a real camera.

This brings us to Higgsfield's latest innovation: Steal. Higgsfield lets you steal any picture from the web and recreate it in your own style with Soul. The new AI tool looks amazing, allowing creators to replicate ideas they find online and in the real world. However, Higgsfield Steal is also downright scary, as it allows anyone to steal a creator's idea and style without asking for permission.

How Higgsfield Steal works

I liked what Higgsfield did with its AI image and video models. It shows that any AI startup with the right idea can come up with products that compete against the top AI firms. After all, ChatGPT and Gemini also let you create realistic AI images and edit pictures. You only need a text prompt with detailed instructions, and the AI will get to work. Several other AI products exist that support similarly advanced image and video generation.

But none of these tools have done what Higgsfield Steal proposes. You can copy any idea a creator had for their content, and then put your face on it. "Introducing Higgsfield Steal," the AI firm said on X. "Recreate ANY picture from anywhere on the web. Personalize it with Soul ID. When we say anything, we MEAN anything."

"STEAL stands for – Style Trace Extraction & Adaptive Layer. And with Steal, instant recreation is now fully possible," Higgsfield said in a different tweet. "Don't walk, run."

Unsurprisingly, some people aren't happy with what Higgsfield Steal can do, no matter how sophisticated the AI feature is. In a world where the U.S. government is promoting AI deregulation, there might be little to be done about Higgsfield Steal. After all, even ChatGPT went viral a few months ago for letting users turn any photo into a Studio Ghibli-style AI image.

Stealing requires a mandatory browser extension

Recreating the style of an image with the Higgsfield Steal browser extension. Higgsfield

For Higgsfield Steal to work, you have to install a Higgsfield Browser Extension first. You don't upload a picture to Higgsfield Soul and tell it to recreate that artistic style. Instead, the browser extension lets you hover over any image to "steal its soul," as seen in the clip below. A tutorial on Higgsfield's website provides step-by-step instructions on installing the extension in Chrome. You have to enable Developer mode in the browser.

Even if you put aside the ethical concerns about stealing copyrighted materials, or the ease with which you can create AI deepfakes that have no watermarks, this installation process is a red flag. Rather than installing the extension from the Chrome Web Store, you have to manually get it from Higgsfield. That's something I'd advise against doing.

It's unclear what sort of privileges the Higgsfield Browser Extension will request, and what the privacy implications are. At the very least, the extension will see what websites you're visiting while you're stealing content.

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