Topic: Where did AZoomer/Chimis' art go?

There use to be over 9 or so pages of their stuff here, suddenly it's barely 16 only old stuff, none of the stuff they've drawn within the last 2 years

Did they request a takedown or get copyright struck by Nintendo lol?

topic #62457

Hit send too early, Been a fan of their art for quite awhile and I wonder if it's gotta do with that old drama with them saying they once used generative AI stuff for two pieces but then dropped it cause it wasn't helpful to them
if so I hate to break the news to people but those two are the only two they've ever used generative stuff for and a lot of people use their art to train models with so....

teralucas said:
Hit send too early, Been a fan of their art for quite awhile and I wonder if it's gotta do with that old drama with them saying they once used generative AI stuff for two pieces but then dropped it cause it wasn't helpful to them
if so I hate to break the news to people but those two are the only two they've ever used generative stuff for and a lot of people use their art to train models with so....

Hate to break it to you but the evidence is very damning
forum #483213

The rest of the topic isn't in their favor either

teralucas said:
Hit send too early, Been a fan of their art for quite awhile and I wonder if it's gotta do with that old drama with them saying they once used generative AI stuff for two pieces but then dropped it cause it wasn't helpful to them
if so I hate to break the news to people but those two are the only two they've ever used generative stuff for and a lot of people use their art to train models with so....

Information about this has been added to the artist's wiki page https://e621.net/artists/77683

For future reference, if someone is accused of lying, I wouldn't put much stock into what they say. I'd recommend interested parties review the aforementioned write-up like I had to (I'm no expert & don't participate in these investigations, though I did also go look directly at the appeal thread), but here's my opinion of what they have to say in public after what I saw them say in private.

Yeah, they said they "only made two pieces", and it "wasn't helpful to them". However, they didn't say anything about the far more than two discussions they had in a furry-centric AI image generation Discord server.

Or that they wiped their message history like they had something to hide (we can still see the replies that directly @ed them, & from the discussions, it sure looks like they made a lot more than they say, & that they weren't as scared of AI as they say).

Oh! But they did say that 4 bigger artists who’d publicly accused them later retracted/apologized for their statements!

...but when we reached out to one of them, they also had something to say. Specifically that they never made such apology or retraction.

They certainly had a lot to say to us in their appeal when we asked them to show us PSD files from the period just before they suddenly got drastically better near instantly... but unfortunately, "sure, here's all of them" wasn't one of them. It was more like "here's a bunch of stuff made before that time that shows I can do it yet looks nothing like the accused works", & "here's a couple more recent ones made years later", as if they haven't refined their workflow to hide it better.

Again, if someone is accused of lying, I wouldn't put much stock into what they say. And after they repeatedly proved they were very, very willing to lie to us unsuccessfully, we told them to prove it the only way you really can; by showing us what they can do, specifically outside of the specific circumstances that allow them to easily fake the proof. And in those circumstances, they certainly didn't do much; when we told them they needed to demonstrate the level of skill from their more recent work, suddenly drawing MLP porn isn't exactly meeting the bar, especially when the results indicate such a lack of skill.

I wasn't part of the investigation, but when I reviewed it and figured it out, I was honestly impressed with the cleverness of the deception methodology... and disgusted by the ease. I have negative artistic ability, but give me a week & I could easily produce something only slightly less convincing than their Twitter video; with the multiple years they have under their belt, I'm not surprised they can do it even quicker & better. I'm not saying how I think I did it here cause I don't want it spreading, but DMail me & I can tell you. Trust me, if you look into the PureRef software they use, and you're familiar with using something like OBS Studio as they do, especially for streaming/recording PC games, you can figure it out. It's really quite clever.

That said, there's still indicators of what's going on without it. It's really weird that, once they've finished a line & moved on, they flat-out refuse to redraw it, warping multiple pieces repeatedly to make them fit instead of just redrawing one line.

Actually, come to think of it, why don't they just start by outlining all of the elements with the simple ovals of every single "learn to draw" book on the planet to nail down the sizing, pose, & composition, instead of completing the line work for each individual element & then warping them (& sometimes the entire rest of the piece) until they mesh with the other pieces?

Come to think of it, it's weird how the immediately start by adding details like messy fur tufts (really visible at 1:10 in that video) instead of making the general shape & adding in those details later, right?

Have you ever seen an artist draw body parts like they're putting together Legos?

Hey, for those images they admitted used AI, how did they even use it? Let's check that write-up...

They [said their method] was to create collages by copying high-quality body parts from AI-generated images to refer to them by eye [...] but without strong proof of this, it was more likely [they] were being traced directly.

...well, that would certainly line up nicely with the behavior exhibited here, now wouldn't it? If there was some way to hide a window with their "references" over the captured window (there is) & allow their mouse inputs to pass through that top window (there is), then that would certainly explain the behavior we see here. Hell, with the footage sped up so much, it'd even be difficult to notice the pregnant pause in between pieces where a new "reference" is dragged over the canvas, though that's something benign that would only be suspicious with multiple other strong indicators (there's your livestream explained).

In short, they can spare me the pity party they're pitching on Twitter; they should just own it for the people that enjoy their work regardless of how it's made & find happiness with that, or give up the ghost, or earn their stripes like everyone else had to. I'll have pity when their lying doesn't make things even harder for other artists & our janitors.