This is all ai slop. Should be under misc, and if you paid for this trash you got ripped off.

Base +6, Holion -9, Thenarfking +7, himoud +9, deng98 -6, kyosukei +9, futaldona -30, dasdk +18

This looks like AI ran through a pixel filter. It’s the lighting style that gives it away.

Base +13, Thenarfking +7, himoud +9, deng98 -6, dasdk +18

Running images through a pixel filter doesn't hide that this is just ai slop

Base +6, Holion -9, Thenarfking +7, himoud +9, deng98 -6, dasdk +18

Well, it's not just a pixel filter, he masked the layers and dithered the backgrounds.

Base +18, deng98 +6, krvn64 +34

What gets me is that there clearly was a small amount of effort put into polishing the finished pieces but the poster couldn’t choose starting images that weren’t obviously straight out of some generic shiny rendering anime model.

Base +13, sanformen +6, retroper1 +7, krvn64 +34

Can you tag it properly as AI, thanks

Base +6, dasdk +18

It seems the mods, at least the high ranking ones, have decided that this is not AI. I tend to agree. While they used AI as a source image that is true, the finish product is not AI. Probably the strongest argument for this is the artistic choice on where and how to use dithering and quantization. Now this isn't the same thing as drawing anime. This is pixel art so a lot of it depends on the tools that you're using to create the art.

Another way to consider this argument is that a lot of people who draw anime actually use a source as well, and some of them trace which is very similar to what we're seeing here. The controversial part is his choice of source image. Imagine if a anime artist decided to use AI to generate their concept before drawing it, in order to handle a complex composition instead of sketching or finding appropriate source that matches their intention for the scene. If you're considering this seriously, you can see that it's an argument about skill not that it's AI.

People seem upset that this is generic AI style more than that there's some AI errors or other types of AI artifacts. For instance, I don't see any kind of incongruence between the same character from scene to scene yet people accuse him of using bad source AI, but he either fixed the AI's mistakes or found a good enough model or prompts that it drew the characters consistently. I.e. hair curls stay the same, same cowlick, her earring stays a pearl and doesn't change to a tear drop later, etc. The exception to this is the girl with the short black twin-tails sitting in a tree, which change position every scene.

Base +18, deng98 +6, viturvs +18