Does u/Another_Fellow_Cacti use AI art?

TL;DR: Yes, a lot of their art uses a significant amount of AI, especially for shading, but there are also artworks simply based off of CGI models.

 

 
If you want to waste your time see more details and maybe learn a bit about how to spot AI art along the way then you can find everything below.
If you just want to see evidence that AI is being used, then click here.

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Table of contents:

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Edits:

Edit #1 (2025.01.27) - Cacti posting a response about AI accusations:

Over a month later and Cacti finally addresses the criticism and I will give them credit for it:

Sadly it's a shallow and contradictory reply, posted in the comment section of a meme subreddit.
First off, the issue of the witch hat that was stolen from another artist's artwork was not addressed at all.
Their comment about AI usage is also abstruse and does not reflect the actual circumstances:

"The time I used AI was for the shading only, but from the "shaded" image, there are a lot of mistakes I need to fix like broken coloring, eyes, hands, and etc."

If AI was only used for the shading, then why would you need to fix things like the coloring, eyes, hands, etc.?
Some artists do use AI only for shading (and also disclose it), but if properly used on a sketch or lineart then you wouldn't need to fix eyes, hands, etc.
This document is also filled with examples that show they did in fact not use AI only for shading. There are AI generated clothes, hair, backgrounds, fingers, you name it.

So, now I decided to shade the drawings on my own

So there is zero AI involved now? Why not write that? Or are there some loopholes?

I don't feel like believing them now when they were disingenuous in the past about their use of AI and also stole other people's work. Especially after such a low effort non-apology.

--- edit #1 ends here ---

 

Edit #2 (2025.01.29) - Cacti posting more AI art after response:

It's not even like I want to or enjoy calling someone out. I wish I didn't have to spend time on this and I will likely stop now, but considering the recent "apology" it's almost comical to immediately post another image that once again very likely used AI to a certain degree. I obviously can't 100% prove it (to be fair how should I), but the top part of the night gown being misaligned is a classic AI mistake because AI doesn't understand that it continues behind the arm. And once again the weird hair tips and the hair aligning with the outline of her body just seem fishy.

There is also another Herta image on their pixiv and kudos for using a CG model for the hat this time instead of stealing it from another artist. Some lines and shading make it seem like AI was partially used for that image as well and the compression artifacts on a png image are once again really suspicious.
But a lot of people on reddit don't seem to care if AI was used as long as the image is lewd fetish art, so good for you.
--- edit #2 ends here ---

 

Edit #3 (2025.02.08) - Cacti posting apology regarding stolen witch hat:

Kudos to them for actually addressing it, this is mainly what I wanted to hear.
It would be nice to be more transparent about their use of AI since all of their recent images still use AI for at least shading, but I'm not sure if that will ever happen.

I added some more evidence of that all the way at the bottom of this document. You can find it in the table of contents.
--- edit #3 ends here ---

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Intro (kind of outdated)

I made this document because I saw people call out reddit user u/Another_Fellow_Cacti (who also goes by Cactus-chan/Prickly-Chan/CactusSprout and multiple other nicknames) for the use of AI art, but a lot of those calling them out got downvoted or called liars.
I initially didn't care, but there were two things that annoyed me:

1. u/Another_Fellow_Cacti didn't mention they were using AI art and also didn't show any evidence that would acquit them of any charges. If you're a proper artist, showing evidence that your work didn't use AI is really easy.
2. While looking through their art I found an image that (I'm fairly certain) contained part of another person's artwork, but they took it, tried to cheaply edit it and pass it off as their own.

I used to create a ton of AI art myself and will now explain why I'm extremely sure that u/Another_Fellow_Cacti uses AI for their art and at the same time teach you some tricks about how to identify AI art.

Proof of AI being used for images:

Image 1 - Furina

Let's start with this Furina image:
https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/125073150
Right off the bat one suspicious element is the image resolution.
If you're not experienced, generating higher resolution AI images is tricky and tedious, so the fact that the resolution was a measly 1270x760 was strange.
I immediately noticed some odd elements in the image:

• 1 - Weird shading and artifacts on her skirt
• 2A - Amateurishly painting over the sky, you can see it more clearly in example 2B where I increased the contrast. I suspect there were some weird tree branches and they quickly painted over them. Why would they have to do that if they have the original picture with all the layers?
• 3 - Strange brush strokes on the shoe, looks like someone painted over some elements. The gradient of the shoe is randomly painted over.
• 4 - Lines with weird artifacts.
• 5 - AI is known for having trouble with hair strands and the tip of hairs, these look exactly like AI hair. Also notice how in example 5 the line in the background has a weird break once the hair shows up. Another common mistake AI makes.

I'm fairly certain there was heavy use of AI in this art.

Image 2 - Camellya

Here is the next example, I literally just went to their pixiv and picked the next picture.
https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/125026750
The small image resolution is immediately suspicious again, but I'll keep it short for this one because it's easy to spot that this one used a lot of AI.

• 1 & 2 - AI once again struggling with hair and the tips of hair.
• 3 - The lines of the sweater make no sense. AI has trouble with consistency for things like pattern or grids. Also this sweater has a lot of compression and JPEG-like artifacts, which makes no sense because this is a PNG file. But guess what has JPEG-like artifacts? You guessed it, AI art. Sure, they could say they saved the image first as a jpeg and then again as a png, but you maybe do this by accident once or twice, but we'll see these JPEG-like artifacts on a PNG thing more often.
• 4 - More artifacts on the knee socks.

This images definitely uses a lot of AI. I do think that certain elements like the stars over her head were added later and parts of the outlines (especially of the face and hands) were traced over with a different brush.

Image 3 - Herta (part 1)

The following image makes me fairly mad.
https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/125026694
When I initially saw this image I was a bit surprised because there are two variants, one without and one with the witch-hat. You can use AI inpainting to add elements to art, but this didn't look like AI inpainting. I looked at Herta's original hat design and was surprised by how accurate this was (foreshadowing).

If you paid attention so far this one should also be really obvious to spot as using AI.

Once again the resolution is suspiciously small.
1, 2 and 3 are AI having trouble with hair tips and hair strands.
My suspicion is in general that they trace over the outline of certain parts of the image and for 4. you can see the different brush used for everything closer to the face and these clearly stand out compared to all other parts of the art.
Also once again a lot of weird compression artifacts in a .png file.

Herta Part 2 - The stolen Witch-Hat

 
 

EDIT: Please see >here< !!!
 
 

Now for the witch-hat.
I was unsure about the hat so I literally just reverse image searched it and the first result looked suspiciously similar.

I found this image from the 5th of December 2024 so four days older than the AI art in question. https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/124915869
While details and shading look different the whole composition is way too similar.

Didn't even bother rotating it one bit.

You might think they maybe traced it, but there is an AI feature called image-to-image (img2img) that lets you create AI art specifically based on an input image and you can set how closely it should resemble said image.
So you would chose an input image, set the output to very closely resemble the input and you got your cheap AI copy. Which would also explain the hat's AI looking style.

But here is the cherry on top of this whole incident and it's so meta and funny that I couldn't make it up even if I wanted to. So you know how AI is known for not being able to draw hands?
Well if you pay attention to Herta's witch-hat design you might notice that the black elements on top are two hands with the golden circles being where the joints are connected.

WELL THE AI COPY DIDN'T MANAGE TO DRAW THESE HANDS...

I didn't even bother making more breakdowns for the other images, there are more AI images on their reddit/pixiv account. I think a lot of images also have some retouching done, like outlines traced or some obvious AI mistakes fixed, but it's still easy to spot the AI elements.

 
 

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Edit with more AI examples:

A couple people actually replied to me and messaged me about suspicions they had and images they were curious about so here are some more quick examples:

• 1 - Weird artifacts and notice that strange long black tip on the hair in the middle
• 2 - Weird artifacts and hair bending in unusual ways
• 3 - I get that her hair has this yellow inner color, but that one fully yellow area looks really out of place. A bunch of the hair tips are also deformed and the outlines and shapes are weird
• 4 - Notice how the shape of that one vertical hair strand in the background makes zero sense. These are fairly common because AI has trouble with understanding that this is supposed to be one long hair strand because it gets interrupted by other hair parts. Common AI mistake.
• 5 - Just like with 4 notice how at the bottom the single vertical hair strand suddenly becomes thicker and changes shape, common AI mistake
• 6 - I know hands are difficult to draw even for artists so who knows, but when I saw this one it just looked suspicious because it has shading and everything, but you didn't bother to fix the pinky?
• 7 - Notice how that one strand of hair over her shoulder makes no sense, it comes from the back?
• 8 - This avant-garde drink & ice cube combination is just weird on multiple levels. The top-middle is missing some drink (since you'd want the surface of the drink to be round/oval like the glass), the ice cubes also make no sense and the bubbles look strange as well.

I also noticed this one and it might be one of my favorites:

I guess AI hasn't figured out how buttons work.

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There was also someone who pointed me to this image. I didn't make this one but the hair on the top left is really obvious:

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Also a special shout-out to reddit user u/Devo-S-Kare who correctly deducted the Herta hat hand situation a couple days ago already and got downvoted for it:

 

Another edit with some more examples of AI being used:

I hope this will be the last time, but I will point out one more batch of AI art and teach you another method of exposing AI being used along the way.

Me teaching you stuff about AI art

IMPORTANT: This method, while pretty effective, is no magic super-method that works all the time and is 100% foolproof. It only works in certain situations, usually for art that is not too heavily compressed and that uses cel-shading/flat shading. That is art where you have big areas of the same color, so it's excellent for most of Cacti's art.

So AI art generators and especially stable diffusion basically create AI art from noise. An AI image is being generated in multiple steps and the process looks something like this:

source: https://klaviyo.tech/trying-to-understand-stable-diffusion-ea55eefca798

The way AI is generated and trained causes it to have special kinds of artifacts that are unique to AI (and that I mentioned in this document before).
For some AI art, especially flat- and cel-shading, you can see these artifacts if you play around with the brightness and contrast of the image.
Here are two AI images I pulled from civitAI link1 link2

Notice the cloud-like noise? A lot of AI generators by default have trouble generating areas with the same flat color and without any gradients.

But DO NOT mix them up with these types of artifacts. They are compression or rather .jpg artifacts.

You can tell by the blocky-ness and that they usually appear in the same blocky pattern.

And DO NOT mix them up with these artifacts. This is some kind of paper-texture/film grain type noise.

The actual examples:

Now back to Cacti's art.
The following images have the original on the left and a version with adjusted brightness and contrast on the right.
If you read the part above on how to detect certain AI art by tinkering with the brightness an contrast, then these should speak for themselves.

Note: See those completely white areas on the right side? I didn't add those, they are in the original images and only become visible once you tinker with the brightness and contrast. You can literally see how they edited the images and where they drew over elements.

I think this one is interesting, because you can tell that the bottom part (pun intended) was actually drawn/shaded by hand.