AI influencers

The claim

“The AI influencer I made 30 days ago from scratch in 2 minutes is now making me $3,000 a month.”

@JafarNajafov, 29 October 2024, 1,687,574 views¹

“HIGGSFIELD PAYS YOUR AI INFLUENCERS. Up to $100,000 a week.”

@higgsfield_ai, 21 January 2026, 2,244,049 views¹. This is the account of a company that makes an AI video tool.

This page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted. We checked no income claim in the tweets; views are as collected on 6 October 2026, and dates are worked out from tweet ID numbers¹. An “AI influencer” is a social media account whose face and body are made by software. Fan subscriptions are a separate method, not judged here¹.

The sums

Most recent tweets push paid campaigns: a company pays creators per 1,000 views to post videos about its product¹. We could read two campaign rates: $1, from a podcast-clip campaign and a how-to guide whose campaign terms we could not find⁶¹¹; and $2, from campaigns paying existing pages to repost clips promoting Higgsfield, not AI characters⁵⁷. By our sums, $1,000 a month needs 1 million views a month at $1, or 500,000 at $2⁵⁶.

A case study of Higgsfield’s creator programme reports 60,000 tracked posts and 350 million views⁸. That is about 5,800 views a post, and one post in about 1,100 passed a million (our estimates; no period is stated, and the programme is not only AI characters)⁸.

Higgsfield’s own programme, Higgsfield Earn, pays for each approved video made to its briefs². It publishes no rate, but caps a video at $2,500 for its lifetime². “Up to $100,000 a week” would take 40 videos that each reach the cap (our sum)¹². We did not find Higgsfield’s own definition of the figure.

What happens to most people who try

We found no study or platform figure for the share that earn anything.

• A news agency reported Higgsfield’s chief executive saying “more than $800,000 had been distributed to over 10,000 creators within three weeks”⁹. That is about $80 each on average over those three weeks (our division of the company’s figures, read second-hand)⁹.
• In the two $2 reposting campaigns, the top three accounts took about 80% and 78% of the money (our sums)⁵⁷.
• Business Insider reported that on one marketplace, brand deals with AI accounts fell by around 30% in the first eight months of 2025 against the same months of 2024³⁹.
• Granny Spills, an AI character, reached 1 million Instagram followers “in her first few weeks”⁴⁰. TIME reports a maker saying TikTok flagged its videos as “unoriginal” and cut them from TikTok’s own payouts; no income figure was given⁴⁰.

Our estimate: the common outcome from view-based campaigns is probably nothing to a few hundred dollars in total over the first months⁸⁹¹¹¹².

The upside

• Three contest nominees told the New York Post in May 2026 that their characters bring in $1,500, $2,100 and $4,500 a month³⁷. These are unproven statements from a hand-picked group in a contest co-hosted by Fanvue, a subscription platform³⁷.
• Aitana, run by a Barcelona design agency, was reported in 2023 at an average of €3,000 ($3,300) a month, and “just over” EUR 1,000 an advert³⁰³¹. The figures are the agency’s own and include a subscription page³².

Higher figures come almost entirely from subscriptions and adult content, or from selling a course³⁴³⁵⁴¹.

A good result for a skilled maker, on our estimate, is about $1,000 a brand post and $1,500 to $4,500 a month for full-time work³⁰³⁷. The share of accounts reaching it is unknown. We found no checked case of a solo newcomer earning a steady income from brand deals and platform payouts alone.

What it takes to compete

• Existing skill, often a team. Aitana’s makers are trained designers, and one of Granny Spills’ makers already made videos for TikTok³³⁴⁰.
• An original character that says it is AI. Instagram says it will limit the reach of profiles showing an AI-generated person without its AI label⁵⁰.
• Your own videos. At least eight tweets teach swapping a character into someone else’s viral clip¹. Meta says unoriginal content “cannot be monetized”⁵³. No platform we read says whether a swap counts, so this is a risk, not a ban.
• Money. Tools cost about $80 to $150 a month (our estimate, from price trackers that disagree)²⁴.

To tell early, in our judgement: under 500,000 views a month that meet a campaign’s rules, after 60 to 90 days, means under $1,000 at the best rate we saw⁵.

Who else makes money from it

By our collector’s labels, about 30 of the 47 tweets come from accounts promoting a tool, guide, course, referral or similar offer¹. Higgsfield offers referrers “up to 25% commission for up to 12 months”; we did not check whether any account we collected is an affiliate²⁶.

Higgsfield pays for videos about Higgsfield, so its payout is a company’s marketing budget²⁸. It earns from subscriptions to its tool²⁵.

Fanvue keeps 20% of every sale¹⁹. The two largest solo income claims we found come from people who sell a course or coaching on the method³⁵⁴¹.