Artist: ravenfalls (artist) (locked)

Staff members involved: Lafcadio, Plentyofsoup, spe
One of this artists' posts was brought to attention by Plentyofsoup, showing a fox anthro sitting down and handling a bowl and spoon. They remarked upon a few details including the character missing a right toe and a left finger, but by this point the artist had already left a comment on the post trying to defend these quirks, saying that the difference in fingers was an intentional story detail, and the difference in toes was down to one of the toes being hidden by the perspective. spe and Lafcadio then did some further analysis in that order, listing additional findings.

It is worth noting that even before this investigation formally began, several My Little Pony posts from the artist two years ago were deleted for plagiarism, containing incomplete color fills and other editing errors that were suggestive of using somebody else's work as a basis. These findings were never contested by the artist.

Taking both the new details and the prior plagiarism into account, Lafcadio deleted the two posts and privately compiled technical notes.

Less than an hour later, the artist opened up an appeal via Discord. Lafcadio prompted the artist to share evidence in their defense, explaining that he would like to try and determine the artist's artistic ability after he had handled the previous MLP posts from their account.

The artist did not claim to have any further artistic work between the two sets of posts; taken at their word, this would simply mean that they had this level of artistic ability with no evident practice. At the same time, the artist began challenging Lafcadio to post the specific source images to prove RavenFalls's plagiarism, suggesting that every new artist without prior history must be "stealing art", and suggesting that Lafcadio was discriminating against them specifically. They asked him to provide his evidence for finding their newest work suspicious, and mentioned taking screenshots of the conversation.

Lafcadio declined, immediately explaining sharing this kind of information would inform AI-assisted artists as to how to avoid suspicion. Recognizing this tactic, Lafcadio gave an ultimatum: the evidence was available for other staff to review even if he was accused of wrongdoing, so the artist would have to either submit evidence, escalate the appeal to higher staff, or voluntarily end the appeal.

The artist decided on the first, promising to take photos of their sketchbook upon returning home, "at which point [they] best get an apology". About 5 hours later, evidence was submitted, including "evidence.rar", a series of photos of traditional drawings resembling a digital collage of theirs, and "next.psd" a digital piece of their fox character. The latter file included a few more details consistent with AI image generation, but the raw generation itself was not present.

Within next.psd, there were a few details consistent with AI image generation. The layer structure included 20 separate lineart layers, largely separated by body part with a few of the layers instead consisting of "upper fur", "low fur", "leg/bodydetail", "right leg fur", "left leg fur", etc.; each layer showed various signs of being cut out from a finished image, suggesting that these were likely to be modified from an AI image generation.

Also present was an empty "colours" folder, and a "rough" folder with the following four layers: "eyes rough", "fur rough", "rough", "start". These included several slightly different blockouts. Given the nature of the completed lineart layers, it was likely that these roughs were made based on the finished lineart.

More damning was evidence.rar, including a series of 11 photos taken from 2026-03-17-12:59 AM to 2026-03-17-01:26 AM. Of these, various differences were found from the digital collage uploaded to e621 that could only be explained by later cleanup, or by the traditional drawings being based on the digital versions. Several lines visibly changed shape, became shorter, or completely disappeared between the different versions.

With a clear path towards an innocent verdict established, Lafcadio brought up his findings related to differences between different versions of the same headshots. Supposing that a cleanup might help to explain some but not all of these differences, Lafcadio invited the artist to share any pre-cleanup versions. If the artist could bridge the gap between the two versions, then he would simply have to accept the changes in lining as nonsuspicious.

The artist provided no such third versions, instead explaining that they scanned the images into photoshop, erased "any kind of major mistakes", "might do a little warping if needed", modified the ears by cutting and pasting, and deleted the paper backgrounds to replace them with a "blank sheet".

The prior findings by Lafcadio and co. made this explanation impossible. Several other details besides the ears were modified, and several lines were entirely different between the two versions, making anything but a complete redraw of these details impossible.

Everything pointed to the new evidence being forged or sharing other traits in common with AI image generations. The artist's explanation of their digitization process was unsatisfactory. The only photos submitted were dated after the appeal started, even though post #6259753 should've at minimum had a scan from 2026-03-14 or earlier. With all these considered, Lafcadio decided to end the appeal to make this writeup.