Staff involved: spe, Strikerman, Lafcadio

As a bit of important context, at the time of this investigation, full AI paintovers were allowed. Thus, this investigation was approached from the angle of proving an incomplete paintover, not proving the use of AI assistance in general. However, the change in policy to disallowing all AI paintovers means this conviction remains in place.

spe deleted a number of posts from this artist without any specific commentary provided. Lafcadio later brought it up on 2024-11-28 to ensure that the policy at the time was being applied correctly, providing his own commentary: post #5195147 had incomplete color fills evidenced by white pixels around black lines, and the artist's blush stickers had a strange pattern where several near-uniform lines blended into each other very smoothly. This was unlikely to be the work of a human, and the final product was just irregular enough that it was not likely to be a stamp or any other non-AI tool.

As a result of Lafcadio's findings, he continued deleting posts from the artist, and provided a series of comments as explanation.

Threezetas's s contain:

• a very consistent "blush sticker" pattern that only appears in generative imagery. status:any id:5175054,5176313,5181944,5183975,5186152,5188000,5190140,5190522,5192191,5195147,5198543,5204831,5208730
• incomplete color fills that occur with unusual frequency for an artist who otherwise appears to have decent shading.
• coloring/shading that bleeds out of the linework; see above the tail and behind the head in post #5186309.
• shading that is decently detailed but in practice is completely nonsensical; see the tail in post #5198543 and the shading just behind it, in spite of Espeon's leg being very well lit.
• very consistent line weighting that almost never varies.
• an overt anatomical error where post #5196632's Jolteon has four toes but three toe-beans.

Most of these are at least occasionally identifiable with an amateur digital artist who's finding their sea legs, but the blush sticker pattern elevates this from "well-meaning but suspicious artist" to "overt fraud", and their commenting history more or less reinforces this by misdirecting in ways like "maybe the janitors thought (X)" or defaulting to the classic excuse "it's my style".

Please compare the two images below.

https://twitter.com/thebird444/status/1855629399896330283
https://twitter.com/thebird444/status/1856013156855767427

These are two different stages of the same image. In spite of having linework for a Lucario, notice that the colored version mysteriously introduces the omnipresent generative blush stickers. In a manual coloring workflow, this would simply never occur. There is no magical brush or stamp that produces these slightly irregular multi-layered blush stickers, this exact style of blush is simply an artifact of how programs like Stable Diffusion resize and refine their outputs. If there were a stamp or a brush capable of generating these kinds of blush stickers, then one would expect every one of Threezetas's blush stickers to look perfectly similar. They're not. Jolteon's blush is not perfectly similar to Umbreon's, Eevee's are not perfectly similar to Flareon's, etc.

The simple explanation (and therefore the one that's most likely to be correct, taking into Occam's Razor) is that Threezetas is generating Pokémon, drawing linework based on the output, and then combining manual coloring and AI-generated coloring to create the final product. Our current standards do not allow incomplete paintovers like this to approval, and so all of these deletions are correct.

If Threezetas takes umbrage with these accusations then they need to conclusively prove that all 100% pixels are manual art: go the ai generated reference route and release the reference image separately, demonstrate their workflow from start to finish by means such as streaming, distribute their layered source files for examination, things like those. I will not accept anything less than a direct response to the accusations levied by the other post approvers.

The artist never made a formal attempt to appeal, and deleted the tweets that Lafcadio cited as proof, but not their other 2024 works. It was clear they had seen Lafcadio's comments but were not interested in trying to prove their innocence, and merely wanted to save face by destroying the most obvious evidence.

Later on 2025-03-25, the artist posted to Twitter a screenshot of their art program, including layers for a Lopunny in a swimsuit. The screenshot could not be accepted as proof as it merely proved the existence of layers, not human work; at this point, it was already established that Threezetas was tracing over AI-generated images with partial paintovers to obfuscate AI coloring, so their tracing workflow would naturally generate these layers anyway.

Even in 2025 and 2026, AI-generated coloring remained evident in Threezetas's work.