The new Kao Coin drawing contest is coming up in just over a month. A few AI-generated coins unfortunately snuck into the collection in last year's contest, and in addition to new ways to lessen/remove that this year, I plan to remove and replace AI-coins that are already in there.
I feel that replacing them with new coins (hopefully of the same topic) will be better than having coins randomly go missing and the help requests that come pouring in from that.
So, if you have a coin in your collection that you feel is AI-generated, please do the following:
1. Post a screenshot of it here, making sure the coin number is listed.
2. Give a short reason(s) for why you think it is AI generated.
The coloring looks like as it's coming from AI, I've seen a lot of AI drawings which were colored similar like this one and also the shapes and details look weird to me.
(This is from the same person)
The background doesn't look handmade at all and the kittens paws look strange to me
The background doesn't look handmade at all and the kittens paws look strange to me
I think the problem with the paws is the back one is at a weird angle compared to all the others, including the hidden one, and the near front one has an awkward line.
Also the pattern seems a bit off – particularly the stripe above the near front shoulder and the way the white shade covers the back legs... ah and the tail stripes. These pattern issues might be nothing, but in light of the other issues, they do add up...
As for one I noticed... at first I was going to say "even if not necessarily AI it looks like a random picture with the Kao face drawn on"... but then I noticed the form of front legs is very twisted and maybe kinda merged together, in a very much AI fashion.
I don't think that's ai, they just used drawing tools. Any drawing app will have tools for making perfect shapes. I think most of the drawing was drawn with tools like that, which is super normal for beginner digital artists
Aside from the AI "tells", I think one of the ways that makes it easier to spot them is to see how much kaochan is "integrated" into the original picture. For that last one, it is literally a picture of kaochan, so I'm pretty sure it's legit. However, you'll occasionally see (I've had to reject a number of these before in the past) ones where it feels very much like a picture with kao's face just drawn onto it.
Someone else already posted the other two coins this person made (the uncensored ones at the bottom), but I believe this is also AI if you look at the details:
I've circled some areas where the linework looks a bit odd (you might have to zoom in), lines with blurry edges that blend in with their surroundings and detached lines that are inconsistent with the rest of the drawing's style are often a characteristic of AI. Also when zooming in I noticed a part that was shaped like a leaf but almost completely blended into the background, which even if an artist were to accidentally leave one part unfinished there would probably at least be visible linework or unshaded coloring. Also you can see that the overall rendering is rather blurry and the brush strokes aren't really visible, which isn't always characteristic of AI but AI images often don't have distinct brush strokes, which lines up with the other telltale signs here
The coloring and the birds feet looks very AI and also the thing in the middle that probably represents Kao doesn't even look like Kao and everything is so unsymetric.
Maybe if you aren't sure about whether an art piece is authentic you can talk to the person who submitted it. If they don't respond at all you'll still have to make the decision about whether to keep/choose it as a Kao coin, but if they do respond you'll have more to go on than speculation. You probably already do that though.
The coloring and the birds feet looks very AI and also the thing in the middle that probably represents Kao doesn't even look like Kao and everything is so unsymetric.
I think that's just the artist's stylistic choices. The person who submitted that one has a very well thought out Kao garden, so I think it's unlikely that they submitted AI generated art.
The person who submitted that one is very active on the forums, and it looks like it was made using Adobe Photoshop, so I think that's just how they made it.
Other than the weird limbed dog and the three submissions by the same person that has been mentioned by multiple people, I think it's unlikely that any of the other Kao coins were AI generated art. I looked at all the Kao coins multiple times, and they all seem so genuine and representative of the people who made them. So I think of all the Kao coins, there are just two incidents of using AI, with four Kao coins total. Of course there's no way to be sure, but I think that looking for more pre-existing AI coins than already mentioned would be more likely to hurt the artists than uncover undeserved fame. As for future Kao coins, I think マイコー has good prevention policies. Sorry if this is a little long, that's all I'll have to say on the subject.
I think you may be mistaking digital brushes or the use of art assets for AI work. Sorry, this is gonna be long - I teach digital art and have even used ai generation in the early stages when it was a novelty and before its ethical use was called into question.
AI has a distinctive blurry-shapelessness. The AI goes off of patterns and isn't aware that what is making is specifically a foot or eye or water bottle etc etc, and so the result may end up feeling undefined. Sometimes different parts melt into eachother, or it may lose count of fingers/teeth etc. This may also result in strange artifacts, or shading that doesn't quite fit (though this could also be an artists who is not quite practiced with their shading). Another thing to note, in another post above, hand shapes were called into question as "AI" because they were "too perfectly round" - AI actually tends to do the opposite, and trends towards "blobs"! It is exceptionally easy for an artist to use a digital art tool to create a perfect circle, AI does not have access to these tools.
The puppy image from above is the best example of what I mention above, here you can see the legs are unrealized, aimless shapes that don't have defined ends, are unequally sized and merge into eachother- this is definitely ai art, I have zero doubt.
To go over the two examples given: The lighthouse coin is clean, but has a subtle hint of unevenness in the height of the railing at the top (That kind of thing is a pain to draw at that angle!!) and a stylistic curve on the sides of the lighthouse that reads to me as being drawn by hand. The cloud/mist effect is very realistic, yes, but within the realm of a digital artist either using a cloud-stamp brush or an overlay if not painted manually. Look up "Cloud Brushes" on the website "Brusheezy" and you'll see what I mean. The only thing that reads to me as "suspicious" is the change in shading style for the foreground rock (cellshaded versus soft shading), and the grass blades in the front where they change suddenly to a more blueish tint - but that could also be lighting to mimic night light. Honestly, the change in art style feels more like something a human artist would do. The lighting in that piece is gorgeous honestly, so I really hope it is not AI.
For the Mountain, the sky is well within the possibility of using Blending or Cloud brushes over top of eachother- I can imagine how I'd do this in Clip Studio Paint. The stars are too consistent and sharp to be ai (ai doesn't really save "symbols" as far as I know, compare to this ai stock image in which the stars have differing numbers of points and lose their shape) and these are most certainly made with a brush (If you zoom in, you can even see one overlap the mountain a bit, which means the stars were added on top). If anything, due to a slightly differing art-style between the mountain and sky, it could be a background asset...but the only issue with that is whether the artist had permission or not to use it.
However, many free assets are available and using assets in art on it's own is not "cheating", you wouldn't accuse a mixed media artist of being a "cheater" for using scrapbook paper or stamps as a background for example. Depends on what percentage is used, etc, And it is not really relevant to the issue of AI being used. I am unsure what is meant by the background being "Fake" other than that, it is art it is all fake!
But I am assuming the change in the level of detail is what you meant?
Anyway, when judging the effects added to art pieces, keep in mind there exist many specialized tools for artists that are intended for artists to use. And also that AI has a very distinctive funk to it, especially AI technology available at the time past contests were running.
So about that ヒーロー coin, it's against the rules to make a coin by editing pre existing artwork, so even though it's not ai I feel like it should be removed? Unless there's some reason マイコー's excusing it? Otherwise, I would agree with ツカレタくん that we should refrain from having this become a witch hunt.
Aaaaand having said that, I think that I maybe suspect one too...
The face (at least the mouth and eyebrows) definitely don't look original to the rest of it, and while there's no hands or paws to show obvious ai shenanigans, the line work is very muddled (notice the scales and tailfins). What do you guys think
Aaaaand having said that, I think that I maybe suspect one too...
The face (at least the mouth and eyebrows) definitely don't look original to the rest of it, and while there's no hands or paws to show obvious ai shenanigans, the line work is very muddled (notice the scales and tailfins). What do you guys think
As for this one, definitely agree. The tail fin especially looks like ai, has a shape that does not make sense even for a new artist and even combines into the hand, and there are odd artifacts around the top of the head and sides. Left ear has half-details at the bottom that don't match the other and what feels like "lines" around the shading that the other ear doesn't have (which also feels very AI). I don't want to sound too arrogant but I am 99.9% certain it's AI.
I think you may be mistaking digital brushes or the use of art assets for AI work. Sorry, this is gonna be long - I teach digital art and have even used ai generation in the early stages when it was a novelty and before its ethical use was called into question.
AI has a distinctive blurry-shapelessness. The AI goes off of patterns and isn't aware that what is making is specifically a foot or eye or water bottle etc etc, and so the result may end up feeling undefined. Sometimes different parts melt into eachother, or it may lose count of fingers/teeth etc. This may also result in strange artifacts, or shading that doesn't quite fit (though this could also be an artists who is not quite practiced with their shading). Another thing to note, in another post above, hand shapes were called into question as "AI" because they were "too perfectly round" - AI actually tends to do the opposite, and trends towards "blobs"! It is exceptionally easy for an artist to use a digital art tool to create a perfect circle, AI does not have access to these tools.
The puppy image from above is the best example of what I mention above, here you can see the legs are unrealized, aimless shapes that don't have defined ends, are unequally sized and merge into eachother- this is definitely ai art, I have zero doubt.
To go over the two examples given: The lighthouse coin is clean, but has a subtle hint of unevenness in the height of the railing at the top (That kind of thing is a pain to draw at that angle!!) and a stylistic curve on the sides of the lighthouse that reads to me as being drawn by hand. The cloud/mist effect is very realistic, yes, but within the realm of a digital artist either using a cloud-stamp brush or an overlay if not painted manually. Look up "Cloud Brushes" on the website "Brusheezy" and you'll see what I mean. The only thing that reads to me as "suspicious" is the change in shading style for the foreground rock (cellshaded versus soft shading), and the grass blades in the front where they change suddenly to a more blueish tint - but that could also be lighting to mimic night light. Honestly, the change in art style feels more like something a human artist would do. The lighting in that piece is gorgeous honestly, so I really hope it is not AI.
For the Mountain, the sky is well within the possibility of using Blending or Cloud brushes over top of eachother- I can imagine how I'd do this in Clip Studio Paint. The stars are too consistent and sharp to be ai (ai doesn't really save "symbols" as far as I know, compare to this ai stock image in which the stars have differing numbers of points and lose their shape) and these are most certainly made with a brush (If you zoom in, you can even see one overlap the mountain a bit, which means the stars were added on top). If anything, due to a slightly differing art-style between the mountain and sky, it could be a background asset...but the only issue with that is whether the artist had permission or not to use it.
However, many free assets are available and using assets in art on it's own is not "cheating", you wouldn't accuse a mixed media artist of being a "cheater" for using scrapbook paper or stamps as a background for example. Depends on what percentage is used, etc, And it is not really relevant to the issue of AI being used. I am unsure what is meant by the background being "Fake" other than that, it is art it is all fake!
But I am assuming the change in the level of detail is what you meant?
Anyway, when judging the effects added to art pieces, keep in mind there exist many specialized tools for artists that are intended for artists to use. And also that AI has a very distinctive funk to it, especially AI technology available at the time past contests were running.
((Thank you for writing that out btw!! It expressed really well a lot of the things I too had been wanting to try to explain but couldn't do figure out the right wording ))
As for looking for AI art I think another good thing to consider when looking at an art piece is artistic intent/stylistic choice - like for example if an artist drew a purple cat, another person might look at it and say, "why would you draw a purple cat, cat's aren't purple!" When the answer is that they thought a purple cat would be cute! (Please forgive the silly example but hopefully it gets the idea I'm trying to express across)
As far as trying to tell what that looks like in regards to art, the best way I can think of to describe the difference is a when something seems out of place, but in a way that feels unintentional? Like how in the examples above all of the faces seem to be the same kao chan ish style but in ways that when you look at the piece as a whole and then the face it kinda comes across as jarring. And in general I feel like a human artist would usually look at that and either try to do something to *highlight* that because their artistic choice is that they want that effect, *or* try to make it more cohesive to the rest of the piece because they *don't* want that effect.
Anyways I shall not ramble further, but I hope that got across I was trying to say (and now I wanna draw a purple cat...)