Is this commission AI or hand-sketched? Wanting a second…
A commissioner discovered that an $80 digital art piece was likely AI-generated despite the artist's claims of hand-sketching and providing fake progress…
- Incident date
- Jul 2026
- Target
- an individual commissioner
On July 22, 2026, a Reddit user sought community feedback regarding an $80 commission piece, suspecting it was AI-generated rather than hand-sketched as claimed by the artist. The commissioner had previously worked with the artist before the rise of AI generation tools, leading to an initial sense of trust. However, discrepancies in the artwork—specifically regarding hair clips, scissors, and a Post-it note—prompted the user to question the piece's authenticity and consider a dispute through PayPal.
What happened
The commission was intended to be the second part of a three-part series featuring an AU crossover between Corpse Party and Persona 3. While the first image passed an OpenAI verification check, the second image drew immediate scrutiny from the r/isthisAI community. Commenters pointed to several "tells" of AI generation: nonsensical "progress" sketches that did not align with standard digital art workflows, scrambled background images, and gibberish text on a whiteboard.
Technical analysis provided by the community confirmed the presence of SynthID, a watermark used to identify AI-generated content. Furthermore, users noted that the artist likely generated the base image using AI and performed minor manual touch-ups, such as altering the character's hairstyle, to disguise the origin. The incident highlights the growing sophistication of AI deception in the commission market, where artists may pair AI output with fraudulent "work-in-progress" images to deceive clients who believe they are paying for original, human-made artwork.