We are now roughly two years into crossing the boundary between the super early version of Dalle producing nightmare fuel, to AI art becoming more and more difficult to detect. While only a handful of people are exploring the cutting edge of this tech due to the cost of graphics cards, it is still relatively common to see an adorable pony on Twitter and not realize she is AI until later.
I go through this stuff every day and still get fooled all the time if my brain is on autopilot. That's how most of us browse the internet. We are bombarded with thousands of pictures and most likely gloss right over them without really thinking much about it.
Unfortunately, constantly being tricked has shifted many people into another state of mind. The HYPER aware. Where "EVERYTHING IS AI until proven otherwise!!". Today we dive into that new trend that has been a regular occurrence in the EQD submit box, and hopefully stop some of the newer artists around the internet from being damaged by these "AI detectives".
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| This pony is real! But a lot of new people think PKX is AI. (Artist:PonykillerX) |
Before people flock to Twitter for drama, cying fowl at EQD supporting anything at all involving AI, lets clear that up first. This is not a call to completely ignore bad actors passing AI art off as drawn art. Those scams are still nonstop and very prevalent. If you see them on discord, absolutely report them to whatever server you are on.
As far as I'm aware, there isn't a single artist in the fandom personally direct messaging people begging to be commissioned. It's just not a thing.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, real damage is actually being done to regular artists for having "AI styles" as people put it. On to the actual topic at hand!
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| This pony is AI (Siberpone) |
A common email we get in the submit box now is people picking out pictures from the recent Drawfriend post and saying it is AI. Many plug the images into one of those detectors and come back with some 99% result saying the pony is absolutely AI generated.
These detectors are, frankly, garbage. They don't detect obvious AI images if they are at all simplified, and will often call-out images that are detailed. The technology just isn't there yet, and probably never will be. The only one that has gotten relatively close from my experience is Hive Moderation, but even that pops up plenty of false positives.
That being said, I don't mind people letting us know if something is AI. It's a good thing to police our drawfriend posts. Those are supposed to be human made. We allow AI assistance (think basic Photoshop filters and the like), but the actual drawing should be drawn. The problem is when people take it beyond a simple report into a cancel campaign.
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| This pone is not AI - Artist Hioshiru |
Humans, for whatever reason, absolutely love to see the downfall of someone who has been successful at something. Art in particular sparks a lot of jealousy. It's a thing most people wish they could do with results that everyone loves. Just look at all the salty prompters out there that throw shade at artists every chance they get.
Nothing raises the pitchforks faster than the excitement of rallying behind a big ol' cancel crusade. Unfortunately this has become a relatively common thing across the art world. In pony it is luckily pretty rare, but in furry, and ESPECIALLY in anime and concept art it's an absolute blight. Individual Artists in Pixiv, big studios, and everyone in between are constantly being bothered about how their work looks like AI art.
It's one thing if it's just a one-off comment from someone suspicious, but we've watched famous artists working for companies like Wizards of the Coast get completely bombarded by massive cancel campaigns. The recent Final Fantasy set for MTG sparked a huge war against the artist of their Sephiroth promo image. A very well respected artist in the industry who unfortunately was nitpicked to death by a Twitter tryhard pointing out that a character that has about 20 different styles across decades of games had "too many belt buckles in weird spots". 12k likes and 1.7 million views later and the damage was already done.
The internet, for being such an impressive communication vehicle, is actually a really bad at it. Despite countless sources of evidence that the Sephiroth was not AI generated, you still had people like above knee-jerk reacting to it in the most insane ways possible. For the record if you aren't an anime fan, the Death Note is a notebook that lets you murder people by writing their name down. He wants to murder everyone.
There's a chance he never even saw any of that evidence though. Again, the internet is awful at distributing information. It's great at teasing it with a headline, but a vast majority of people see that, make a judgement, and never followup on anything. This means potentially millions of people out there saw that Sephiroth Tweet and now immediately make the connection that they are a known AI "slop" creator, despite decades of experience in the industry producing amazing stuff.
That's not a good thing by any metric, and people are only getting more ravenous as AI becomes harder and harder to tell apart from regular art. I've said it a few times. We are going to cross into a world where you just can't tell anymore. Where anyone can fake being an artist and the only way to verify is history. We do not need more people's reputations tarnished due to crazy campaigns citing shaky evidence like "Sephiroth's jawline is too sharp". It's just not worth it.
We've also run into the comical situation thanks to LoRAs, where people
will report artists and show art made with a LoRA trained on their style
as evidence that the originals are AI. Some of these pieces go as
far back as the early 2010's! But they saw someone repost that 2010 art on Twitter and assumed it was new, followed by sending a message demanding we call the person out for creating AI art and not labeling it.
It's also important to realize that not all AI is created equal. There are a million different ways to draw things in 2025, with tools baked into art programs many artists use to save time. Like I've said before, I have no problem with AI assisted things. Generative filling a pile of dirt in the background of your pony piece is going to throw up AI alarm bells on every detector out there, but there's no way we should be attacking artists for that. Hell, even before AI it wasn't uncommon to go download a texture off Google images and slap it onto your clothing to give it a more clothlike feel. We've been using shortcuts like this since digital art added layers and transparency. I'm not going to hate an artist for clicking a button to generate the clothing texture instead.
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| AI pone |
The moral of the story is, take a moment and think before you join a cancel campaign for AI, or bother an artist directly demanding they show a PSD file as proof that they drew it. This technology is new and scary, and absolutely going to cause some damage on its own, so preemptively attacking the artisans of a medium that is already under attack solves nothing.
I'd like to say we will have 100% accurate detection methods in the
future, but I doubt that will ever be a thing. If anything, as more
people become comfortable merging their skills with the use of these
shortcuts, it will become even more impossible to police.
Where you should actually direct your hate is the companies that fire people and force their employees to do triple the work by generating what their colleagues would have done. If you really want to fight against generative AI, vote with your wallet. Attacking actual artists does nothing other than harm the hobby.
