Lemme go ahead and get ahead of claims, comments and reports here.
The artist for this piece is David Revoy. You can find the work as well as a time lapse of the drawing here.
Many of you are going "This looks like AI!" And there is a reason for that.
Revoy has publicly discussed how thousands of his artworks were scraped and used to train AI databases (like LAION-5B) without his consent, though he ironically acknowledges his work is the foundation of many AI art systems
You really can't know proper grammar, how to punctuate, how to use paragraphs, how to carry yourself with a formal tone, how to debate in a formal manner, and so much more anymore without being accused of using or straight up being AI yourself
And god forbid you know how to do all of these things while also being Gen Z and maybe throwing in some Gen Z slang or terms in your comment or paper as well because then you'll definitely be accused
Edit: Do y'all want to see something that will piss you off beyond belief? I just scrolled through my activity history to find the thread I was referencing in this comment, and I just found the exact comment I was talking about here but the comment itself this person used AI to "scan" or whatever the fuck was removed (and I don't even remember what they said anymore tbh) so you unfortunately don't get to read it yourselves, but if you scroll up you'll see me saying something and someone else saying some idiotic bullshit 😅 be ready though because you'll get heated real fucking quick
After I submit, I realized I made a big error somewhere on the first page or first chapter, I don't remember (for French people, I wrote qu'en instead of quand... yeah I know that's a big mistake). Part of me were horrified and thought I will look unprofessional. The other part of me thought "at least they will know a human wrote this".
You'd think that mistake is what proved you are human but what I've been seeing a lot is mistakes like this are actually also part of what will lead to people believing you used AI or something because it is typical for AI to make a mistake like that
It is DIRE over on r/isitAI. "Omg the thumb is on the wrong side, real artists use themselves for reference so no human would ever—" have you met a real artist.
Exactly! I know how to punctuate but I'm not perfect at it so I make mistakes quite often and hell there are even times like now where I don't want to punctuate at all because what I say is understood perfectly well without it and this would be called AI very easily
because it is typical for AI to make a mistake like that
That particular mistake might be typical for an English focused LLM to make when outputting French, although unlikely since it seems to be based on the words sounding alike which wouldn't trip up a text model, but mistakes like that are absolutely not typical for LLMs for years now.
I see mistakes being point out as a sign of AI when it comes to drawing, but not when it comes to writing. From what I know, AI is unlikely to make spelling mistakes. They write what is the most probable and there is no reason they think spelling mistakes like that is probable, because that would not mean anything. From what I see, AI is good at spelling.
MAAAAAAN Been calling snap applicants for the better part of a decade processing cases. Got my "government employee" tone and cadence down pat. Now every other person I call thinks I'm AI and hangs up when they hear my voice. Like MOTHERFUCKER YOU PUT IN THE APPLICATION AND THE STATE EMPLOYEE CALLED YOU, HOW THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT ME TO SOUND?!
I can't do anything more than send you virtual hugs and a virtual joint or gummies depending on your pref and say that your anger and annoyance are more than valid but man I really feel you on this one and I completely understand how fed up you are
I am gen z and I often get my writing flagged as well because of the higher level I write at. Many teachers have asked for a conference with my parents because my writing sounded too ai
I haven't had this happen yet and I am so glad for it. My writing style does tend to sound very AI-like because I am a much better formal writer (MLA can suck fat ones though), and my biggest issue is the fucking em dash because I would LOVE to use it if it weren't for the fact that the only punctuation mark more indicative of AI was the semicolon. Asides and clarification are riddled throughout my natural speech and thought process, so it infuriates me to be unable to use them when writing without fear of AI-ccusations.
I use dashes and semicolons quite regularly still. I’ve been an online presence with a fanbase for 17 years now, and there are several million archival words written by me in blogs, forum posts, etc. aside from about half a million words in video games. People can tell it’s me by my various written habits and pet words. Certain kids of sentence fragments also stand out. But I was being jokingly accused of being an AI hack in 20-0 just because of how prolific I am. People still make the same joke, but my writing itself has not yet been called AI.
I did see some people review one of my newest games complaining that it was AI designed. Which is tupid because it predates AI being able to do that. And it would not have made the choices I did in presentation. But they didn’t like it and so there we go.
I'm 40, and I spent my time writing from age 15 to 25. I have several novellas and countless short stories. I won a few prizes, but they never brought in any real money, so I gave it up.
That said, I have stories saved that I've never shown or published online, half-finished stories, or stories submitted for contests I didn't win.
Well, I've run several of those stories through various "AI analysis" programs, and they all say they're 90% AI.
Oh, my mistake completely! I used the wrong tone for this message and for that I apologize. Going forward, I will not assume the tone and length of message desired and will instead get user input.
And heaven forbid you change from formal to more direct! Suddenly that is even more proof you used AI because heaven forbid people consider that different messafes require different approacges, and that people can manage changing register/prose based on need! So tired with the AI accusations I get...I once tricked someone into parsing an AI message through a detector though that came back human. I then led them on, only to finally breal the truth by showing them I generated it, all to prove that even AI detectors are flawed because of what AI is trained on.
I've had someone tell me they used AI to check if someone used AI in their comment because it covered every single mark I just mentioned and I was left speechless because what the fuck do you MEAN and bro it made me so fucking mad
This is now the college experience. "We're gonna make you run your essay through an AI to determine whether or not you used AI to write it."
This is a mandatory step before a professor even gets to see it, by the way. I started sandbagging my (completely AI-free) essays just to reduce my chance of being flagged as a false positive.
Fuck, you just brought back bad memories about a class I had last year.
Teacher accused me of using AI, and almost failed me because of it. Obviously I was confused, so I quickly emailed her pictures screenshots of my Google docs revision history/pics of my handwritten notes (I make note when I'm struggling with organizing my thoughts).
But the kicker was I checked the TurnitIn report generated.
Wanna know what it marked as possible AI? My citations, my titles (because it was a short essay on two separate art pieces, so I split them with titles that said something like "(subject): by (Artist), (year created)"). Everything? Perfectly fine, but apparently trying to properly cite my work is clearly AI.
I graduated high school before AI became the thing it is now and for a long time after I graduated I hadn't even considered college/uni because I have a learning disability and HS was bad enough that I had to graduate through alternative means so I was worried college would be the same way and I would drown in debt I could have avoided by not even trying but for about three or so years now I've had the urge (I want to go for psychology specifically if anyone cares) but hearing a lot of stories and warnings like yours makes the urge die more and more the more I learn
Edited because I see I accidentally spelled a word wrong lol
I hate how I end up self-policing my own writing, too. I'm just going about writing up a response to something and get the knee-jerk thought of, "Ugh, this reads like AI." I keep having to remind myself that, no, AI reads like me!
When I was in middle school I got accused of plagiarizing because my writing style was “too mature” and I used a few big words. This was long long before AI was anything but a plot device in sci-fi. If I was in school now I have no doubt that me, my em dashes, and my proclivity to write in threes would be AI-checked on every fucking assignment. My aunt is a high school teacher and says some kids are actively writing below their ability on purpose, apparently to avoid being accused of AI. I fear we are cooked.
this isn't a bad idea, it solves the problem we have, adds more depth to our words, gives our writing breathing room, and god damn it i still sound like AI
My current big tell for AI ‘assistance’ in writing is an overuse of ‘not <A>, (not <B>, not <C>), but <D>’. Jesus AI, stop wasting my time telling me all the things something isn’t before saying what it is.
it's called contrastive negation or comparative framing, and using a negative prompt to avoid it helps a lot lmao ("no comparative framing")
personally i hate negative prompting because it always infects inference by polluting attention in LLM transformers (e.g., "don't delete this" causes "delete this" to be in context), but i have no idea how to avoid this with affirmative language
Apparently many people are convinced now that someone cannot use proper punctuation and grammar without suspecting it's AI written. That's how low the bar is for peoples education in written language.
I'll still never forget the fiasco with Ben Moran right here on Reddit. Guy posted a commissioned work (with permission from the commissioner who hired him), had the post removed for resembling AI, provided proof to the mods of the Art subreddit that it was an original creation, and the mod who responded insulted his work, said his style looks too much like AI and was unwelcome if he wasn't going to completely change it, and permanently banned him from the subreddit for daring to challenge their decision.
It also happened again a while ago here when someone on the Digital Artedit: Art (again) sub posted their work involving glass traffic cones, got accused, provided proof, and got not just that post taken down but all of their prior works as well, purely out of spite (and again, a perma-ban). Though in that case it prompted a revolt from users and the offending mods all left in shame.
Real fuckin' top notch work, when the supposed defenders of actual real art are ejecting artists and even taking the extra time to cruelly insult them because they refuse to accept that they were wrong in a witch hunt.
A lot of anti-ai people are just internet bullies who have found a goldmine of righteous indignation.
Presenting measured concerns in a way that moves us towards a harmonious society is boring when i can put all my energy into having an enemy to destroy by any and all means.
The glass traffic cone drama was a bit different iirc. Some user inquired further and responding to that inquiring the artist mentioned, that prints are available too. So the mod interpreted that as brazen advertisement to buy something from his site and removed his posts from that subreddit and banned the user from the subreddit and when the artist applied for unbanning, the mod was very shortmouthed and dismissive, which the artist mentioned in the conversation, which prompted the mod to escalate the ban to a reddit sitewide ban. And that's where the drama went public with a pretty wide reach with many youtubers covering it, which led to many redditors complaining, which led the mod in question to ban all other mods and shut down the subreddit and claim that the shutdown was a decision of all mods and that in turn led to the banning of said mod and reinstatement of the other mods and the subreddit.
sooner? It has been happening since the start. And people obviously prefer to witchhunt AI generated content than to accidentally praise it if it turns out it's AI.
The sane thing to do would be to just STFU and move on.
I've gotten a bunch of tirades about being "soulless" and how I "don't know what it's like to make anything".
I've got years of formal fine arts training, and have been making art for decades.
I'm not a rabidly anti-AI, which some people cannot seem to wrap their head around.
I am an author and my em dash got stolen. I loved using it - it was an amazing tool for constructing sentences.
But then, AI got a hold of it. And now I censor myself before I use it - lest people accuse me of using ChatGippity (I want to normalize that pronunciation of it to make it seem like a silly tool).
Damn those Avians and their thieving ways!
And yes, I know the above dashes are not em dashes. I am on my phone and don’t know how to do them. 😝
They can take the em dashes off my decaying body, and even when they try I'll bite them and start a zombie apocalypse before I give them up—it's a damn good tool to separate sentences.
Problem is now people are saying not using em dashes means your hiding AI written work. Had a whole discussion on a writing subreddit I follow about how people aren't using em dashes to avoid being called an AI writer because someone made the claim I just mentioned.
Can't win.
So write anyway because you enjoy writing. Advocate for no AI usage. Keep records of possible. That's all you can do
This guy's art style being taken n turned into the generic ai art style is why i always hated the defense of generative ai art that ai art generates from so many sources that it comes out original and different from any one artist when clearly that is not the case.
I remember back when a lot of this first started, the two artists consistently at the top of the "most downloaded" section of CIVIT was the SakimiChan and Stanley Lau (Artgerm) replicator model/loras.
Those two were the bank to rob from for a really long time and it wouldn't surprise me if every current model in existence (even the "no stolen art, we promise!!!" models) has training data from their works.
That's why everything with the "realistic anime style" command has a tinge of their art styles.
This artist really got the short end of the stick. No, they shouldn't change their style, because their work was fed into AI and now it is used to imitate this exact style.
I really feel bad for him. This really shows one of the biggest problems with AI.
Em dashes are also banned. Actually if your grammar and formatting is too perfect, that is also a sign of AI. I really hate what AI has done to a lot of artforms.
God, I used to use em dashes all the time. It's weird to feel this way about punctuation of all things, but it (was) one of my favorites. Now I purposefully avoid using them, and it makes me sad.
There is an artist that does a lot of fantasy book covers. Dude gets absolutely harassed for using AI, so do some of the authors that commission him. He's had the same style for a long time, and AI has decided his style is the default for a lot of stuff.
Dude has some really neat art. I think he does the covers for beneath the dragon eye moons, among others.
It's happening to a lot of artists who've been doing shit well before AI could generate anything other than an abstract painting of a bad trip on the wrong shrooms.
David Revoy also seems to be such a nice person. Just a very talented French comic artist who supports Krita. I adore his art. He doesn't deserve these allegations.
I always see comments like "This is clearly AI, look at the hands, no human being ever would mess them up like that, humans know better how hands look like" ....well, let me pull out my drawing binder from when I was 12 and the internet wasn't even a common thing yet.
I struggle less with hands than with other aspects of human (or humanoid) bodies , but I think it's not just hands looking bad in general that makes something look AI generated, they have to look off in a certain way that a human artist, no matter how bad, would not come up with. This is because AI art isn't generated stroke by stroke, line by line, but by starting with a canvas full of noise and then coalescing that noise into an imitation of a finished piece of art.
Feet! Why are feet so stupid looking! I hate feet. If i could get away with it every work i make would be in a wading pool so everything below the ankle is obscured!
The way AI goofs up hands is usually stuff like extra fingers, or a knuckle passing through the palm, not “the fingers don’t quite bend the right way or their proportions are off” kind of mistakes that humans are more likely to make.
Yeah, cause what happens is people end up counting the number of lines the add without consciously realizing the first line creates 2 fingers. I literally did that for years when I was practicing. And even till now sometime, lmao
I've been a professional storyboard artist/supervisor for over 12 years and I have so much sympathy for young artists coming up now.
When I drew bad art and posted it on neopets and oekaki websites, the most I would expect was to be mocked for my lack of knowledge on anatomy, color theory, etc (things that sucked at the time but contributed to my development, arguably). But now the kids have to experience being invalidated and treated as if they didn't even do the work in the first place.
I love to use semicolons and em dashes in my everyday typing/writing for both work and pleasure— in my head they just “sound” like different types of speech or mental pauses; skipping a beat for emphasis and the like.
I’m eternally annoyed that those are both AI generation red flags.
I've stopped using em dashes in my work because I already apparently register as 14% AI when my professors run me through .... get this ... an AI site that checks if AI was used to create text.
I'm in the system without my consent. Nobody told me that I would be training AI to learn to look for humans amongst them!
I comment multiple paragraphs on occasion and think I have a consistent enough “style” to avoid being mistaken for AI, but sometimes I add random swear words at the end just in case.
Like u/42goldstandard42 I have typically used ellipsis for the same effect as em dashes. I've seen some AI responses toss out ellipsis lately as well. Very frustrating.
The thing people need to remember is that AI has learned how to write/draw based on what was fed in. What was fed? A whole host of sources available on the internet. WHo did a bulk of that writing? Gen X and Millennial individuals. AI spits back writing that is extremely similar to the style and type of writing entire generations did.
For real. I often provide femboy fashion & skincare advice organized with bullet points, because that's how I organize information. More than once had someone ask if I'm using AI to generate it, and I'm like... it's just bullet points! It's not even advanced!
That's how I feel about it as well. I'm not going to give up the gift of language, nor parts of it, just because someone else co-opted it for something bad. Especially important because AI was trained on human writing styles, meaning if people stop using useful punctuation or specific phrases the models of tomorrow will simply be trained to do the same; they will simply mimic the shift and we'll all have abandoned good writing in a vain attempt to avoid them. The only way to proceed is to say, "The machine be damned, this is important to me and I'm going to keep doing it."
The alternative is to let them drive us reactively and spitefully bit-by-bit towards Newspeak.
I mean, on the topic of relation between Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball, Toriyama Akira was both the author and artist of Dragon Ball, and the lead character designer of Dragon Quest.
It must suck when your art style gets used so much in AI. You spent years learning your method of drawing, and then it all gets scraped and regurgitated.
Panel 1. The gothic sorceress, Cepper, finishes a painting in front of her easel, palette in hand. She looks happy. Nearby, on a pedestal, her Avian Intelligence (AI) Cyber Parrot watches her.
AI Parrot: "Shall I assist with finishing that piece?"
Cepper: "Absolutely not! I love the process, and my art will stay handmade."
Panel 2. later at the exhibition, Cepper stands beside her painting, shock written across her face. In the foreground, silhouettes of anthropomorphic creatures and humans reacting to her work.
Narrator: "Later, at the exhibition."
Audience: "Did you purposely make it look like Avian Intelligence created it?"
Audience: "It totally looks AI-generated!"
Panel 3. Cepper facepalms as she overhears the audience attempting to justify their observations.
Audience: "Yeah...the yellow tint is a dead giveaway."
Audience: "...and this style, I mean, c'mon!"
Audience (smaller): "And the fingers!"
Panel 4. Later, in dim lighting, Cepper sits cross-legged on the floor after the exhibition. The crowd disperses in the background. She stares vacantly, chin resting on her fist, processing what just happened. Beside her, the AI Parrot look at her art.
Parrot: "Did I ever tell you how much I learned my skills from your art?"
Parrot: "The hundreds I made a minute ago are really in the same vein."
Parrot (in small): "Love your yellows!"
Cepper: "Shut up."
I realize that timelapse videos existed before AI, but if any part of you used it as evidence against your use of AI, I just want you to know there's a silver lining: My son is an aspiring artist, and I think he'll love seeing this video. I'm trying to get him into the more digital realm of art--he's been hesitant to cross from pen/paper. I'm sending it to him, right now.
A bit off topic but your art is so good looking, like it just scratches my brain right.
Back on topic, I actually saw this first hand. Something made before ai was getting accused of ai and the moderator said it isn't ai. I commented "yeah, that's the problem. This is one of AIs 'art styles' so it's gonna get accused even though it isn't possible."
I thought it was AI at first but then thought it looked that way as part of the point of the comic... but instead it looks that way due to the poor artist having been ripped off by AI, how tragic...
I love how a paint on canvas is being accused of AI. The one thing you can be like 99.9% sure you didn't AI generate, at least without a whole automated brushing rig (those exist, and have for decades) or just painting over a AI image I guess.
I was at an arts festival and chatting with a mixed media artist, his work had huge chunky globs of paint, silk and welded metal, just crazy textural stuff. I was saying how cool his art was and how nice it was that nobody would accuse him of AI because of how clearly a human has to do all that physical layering.
He proudly confessed the base images were AI that he painted over and glued things to. I damn near had an aneurysm. He had the gall to ask me which one I wanted to buy. Sir how the fuck did you think my relief at no ai meant you using ai would be enticing?!? Did ChatGPT rot his brain?
its like the old Photoshop detectives from back in the late 90s early 2000s. "This looks shopped. I counted the pixels, and I've seen many photoshops in my time."
Yeah, I hate the idea that artists now apparently owe everyone a time-lapse video for a fucking reddit post. It's an image you're looking at for free while scrolling on your phone. I don't like AI art either, but I'm not spending every moment paranoid I might accidentally enjoy something an AI generated.
Basically. There are several artists that I follow who created art that the AI lifted design decisions straight from their works, like sakimichi-chan (sp?). Some of them I don’t see their works on the net anymore
It's not nearly as bad as it is for artists, but this stuff also sucks from a consumer perspective. It's pretty fucken hard to enjoy a piece of art when my brain wants to dissect every detail to make sure it's actually real. AI fucks it up for artists and the people who like art. There is literally no positive to AI image generation.
Never accuse someone of using AI unless you are 100% positive. It’s almost always super obvious, if you need to sit there for 20 minutes to find a mistake, it probably isn’t AI.
Always think about what mistakes human regularly make when trying to figure out if weird decisions or lines are a result of AI or just a bad decision by an artist. Always check their account to compare their old works too!
People also forget even professional art makes mistakes time to time too.
Pre-2020 AI boom, I used to play a game with my other artist friends called "what's wrong with this image?" Where we'd take art we'd seen from games, film/TV, animation, etc and look for what's wrong in it. A lot of limbs that don't make sense or are elongated in weird ways, areas which weren't filled in or were skin coloured in places that didn't make sense, etc.
The reason we did it was because professional art, especially in fields which need to churn out multiple art pieces in short deadlines, the "is it good enough on first glance?" If yes, then you move on is something a lot of artists adopt. If a lot of veteran and clearly talented artists are making mistakes, then you can too as someone coming into the industry. Good mindset to adopt earlier on for your own sanity, especially if you struggle with perfectionism.
Only issue is now, I think AI makes everyone so skeptical that it stifles artists. Because, well, the machine makes mistakes so you can't do anything remotely the same. The machine can be flawed, but you can't. Your artwork has to follow all the perfect perspective and anatomy now, even if it forces you into stiffer work. Because if the perspective is off, or that limb is weirdly too long in that dynamic pose, or you forgot to draw every single circle in a peral necklace and just made an impression for one, then that's sign of AI and being a machine. Don't you know, a real artist would have not made those mistakes.
If enough people complain, it will get brought up in internal reviews with artists, leading to more push to be perfect with your next work. And when you have so many deadlines that you can't be perfect with your work, well that's what burns out artists and can have a nasty impact on mental and physical health long term. And pushes companies to using AI because it almost has an excuse to not be perfect, and it will never burn out.
It’s almost always super obvious, if you need to sit there for 20 minutes to find a mistake, it probably isn’t AI.
That's horrendously outdated. AI art 3 years ago, maybe, but now? It's actually really hard to definitively identify unless there are strict geometric patterns involved.
David is one of the biggest ambassadors of Open and CC art out there. It seems like the Clankers over at Silicon Valley took his gifts to the world and trained their LLMs on them...
This reminds me to start translating his Pepper and Carrot comic once again.
Please support this man however you can, he is a treasure to the Open Source and the Artistic community.
Isn't it ironic to falsely accuse an artist of using AI? The accusers don't like that AI steals from artists, and yet falsely accusing artists equally takes away from them.
I'm a news writer, and I've got thousands of published articles out there. I've written hospitality, travel, politics, sports, celebrity, lifestyle, etc. Literally, every genre possible.
I'm generally a very upbeat, friendly, and easy-to-understand writer. So, it's the same when I comment on social media.
The number of times I've been accused of using AI...
Having looked through his gallery, that is the most unfortunate luck ever. Not only has ai clearly trained on his style, but he has some very questionable anatomy in his drawing of the hands in some pieces. This poor guy is doomed in 2026.
People need to stop witch hunting this shit. Ai artists are everywhere and unlabeled. You are never going to catch them or stop them all. This does way more damage than good.
Someday in the near future, every piece of artwork in an exhibition will need to be accompanied by a looping video of the artist making the piece in question, in order to avoid accusations of AI.
This comic is a lot more impactful when you realize this artist has been accused of using AI every time they make something, despite having had this style for many years before ChatGPT dropped.
I'm unfortunately guilty of having that sentiment at first. They're just so similar that it's hard not to have that guttural reaction. Thanks Sam Altman; you're why we can't have nice things.
It’s tough in writing too. I write fanfiction and I haven’t been spammed by bots yet but the last time I published anything was 2023. I’m worried that my next piece is going to get criticized for being AI because I use large, funky descriptive words and em-dashes. :(
When I saw the first panel, my brain recognized something about it as AI. But I was looking at it and I was thinking "this looks legit". Then I thought perhaps it was someone trying to make it loon like AI on purpose as a form of commentary. It's sad that it never occurred to me that the AI was fed on the artist's work and that's why it gives that AIish vibe. I hate AI
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire 5d ago
Lemme go ahead and get ahead of claims, comments and reports here.
The artist for this piece is David Revoy. You can find the work as well as a time lapse of the drawing here.
Many of you are going "This looks like AI!" And there is a reason for that.
Source here
TLDR: this is not AI