A guide for the quality expectation Tantabus has for ai composition images
ai composition images are expected to not be simple ai generated images; they should have a high degree of manual (read: human) labor put into them; via using AI to finalize sketches (not stick figures), extensive post-AI editing and cleanup, and/or a large number of inpainting and image composition passes (“photobashing” with AI rather than pinterest spoils).
Images that fail one of the “tests” listed further down are likely to be deleted. Those using AI as a tool for image creation should already be aware of how powerful and versatile AI tools are, and of the availability and ease of use of editing tools such as Krita, Photopea, Pixlr, etc.
All the types of errors listed are expected to be spotted and fixed before upload.
In case of a deletion of an image that was deemed to be an ai composition but had issues, we will in most cases try to notify the creator of the reasoning. The image may also be retagged as ai generated if the errors weren’t egregious enough to also fail the tests on this page.
The example images used below are all purely ai generated were selected to showcase a precise AI related issue for which we might delete an ai composition image, but may present other additional issues. We ask that you focus on the specific issues the image is an example of and ignore extraneous ones.
Additional images are included for examples of non-issues or ones that are “passable”. These aren’t necessarily examples of something good, and if they’re an actual issue you should definitely improve on similar results.
“Ghost Signatures” are artifacts that resemble an artist signature, print name, URL, logo, or the the logo of sites like Patreon or similar. These do not have to be legible or clearly recognizable as text. These sort of artifacts commonly appear on the corners of an image, or along the contour of a character, much as a human artist’s signature would.
These sort of artifacts are extremely easy to clean up, and we give little exception to their appearance in ai composition images.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Bottom right. Artifact does not fit with rest of image, cannot be interpreted as being grass or other detail.
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Bottom right. Artifact on plant leaf is clearly not a detail related to the plant.
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Bottom left, signature-like squiggles.
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Along Dash’s wing, signature-like artifact.
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Bottom left and right, obvious Patreon and other logo
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Bottom right. Odd colour artifact not considered notable or clearly an attempt at signature.
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Text on car grill. Text or text-like elements like these when in proper context for the image not considered an issue, unless they’re clearly a signature or artist/site logo.
B - Bad Anatomy - General
Extra limbs, missized torsos or limbs, body parts shifting or moving in/out of reality after passing behind something, etc. Some of these errors are so grave they cannot be fixed; also so grave that they should have been spotted early and no more work put into the image.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Pinkie’s right foreleg pops in out of nowhere / has an impossible bend.
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Third leg popping out of nowhere.
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Another third leg.
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MC Escher crossed legs, furry face on an unguligrade anthro aside.
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Pinkie’s left foreleg vanishes into her apron or just missing entirely. “She’s an amputee for the purposes of this one specific image” doesn’t fly.
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Arm-hoof and hand.
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Extra hoof popping out the back.
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Big Mac’s arm would be unnaturally long, particularly as it wouldn’t be straight.
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A lot of wrong here. And also no to the second floating Pinkie.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Rarity should be tilted down or her rear legs more posed differently, but issue not major enough to wipe entire image over.
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Pinkie’s right leg and buttocks are too far back, don’t match her torso. Apron also implies her thigh would be quite large. Still, not critical on their own.
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Pinkie’s feet appear to be different sizes. Not major enough to delete entire image over.
C - Bad Anatomy - Deformed Limbs/Extremities
Bad hands, too many fingers, things bending how they shouldn’t, weird bumps… Stylization is OK, fleshblobs are not.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Fluttershy’s right hand is a mess, and heavy contrast with how her left is fine.
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Blob fingers.
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Not enough fingers on one hand, too many on another, plus merging flesh.
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Pinkie’s right leg dislocated or has an extra joint.
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Pain.
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Pinkie’s right hand not gripping properly, really bad as this is a focus of the image.
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Too many toes…
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Four fingers on one hand, 6 on the other.
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Limestone’s left foreleg has too steep a bend inwards, and her right starts to bend off screen past where it should be able to.
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Six fingers on Pinkie’s left hand, not counting a hidden thumb. Or her vanishing right hand.
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Fingers on AJ’s left hand are a mess.
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One hand’s a claw, other has a micro pinkie finger.
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Right hand is a mess, fingers merge with hair, and left foot has six toes.
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AJ’s left hand has an extra finger popping in between two other fingers.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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AJ’s fingers aren’t great, but they’re not obviously wrong or close to being the focus of the image.
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[
Fluttershy’s left hand isn’t quite right, but not horrible.
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The hands are low detail, but not horrible.
D - Bad Anatomy - Phasing and Merging Flesh/Hair/Clothes/Items
Hair merging into flesh, body parts merging into other body parts, characters phasing through objects, clothes turning into different types of clothes…
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Twilight’s arms clearly merging together.
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Hair noticeably clipping through AJ’s ear.
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Vinyl’s arm fusing through Octavia’s.
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Rainbow Dash clipping through table.
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Flash’s left arm and wing contours switch.
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Pinkie and Rarity’s arms clip through each other.
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Mystery unicorn’s hand vanishes through wall.
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AJ’s ear changes size/shape on passing through hat.
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Red hair streak noticeably merges with headwear’s black strap.
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AJ’s shirt morphs from a button-up to a t-shirt.
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Rainbow’s right hand clips through skirt.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Pegasus’ right wing appears missing, but conceivable it may be posed just right to be hidden at this single moment.
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Sign in Rarity’s tail shouldn’t be an issue, prehensile tails for holding objects is canon.
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AJ’s left shirt collar appears to be merging and missing an underside, but issue not on character or highly visible.
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AJ has one strand of hair disconnected from where it should be flowing from. Should be fixed, but would not kill entire image over.
E - Bad Anatomy - Incorrect Facial Features
Weird eyes, extra nostrils, mouths that just aren’t right, eyelashes and eyebrows that are blobs or simply broken… There’re a lot of small things that can go wrong here, but given how important the face is, they have a lot of impact; faces are important!
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Artifact right of Twilight’s mouth, as if trying to draw a second mouth line.
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Rainbow’s right eyebrow breaks as it passes under her hair
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Rainbow’s irises and pupils are wobbly messes, and her mouth more resembles a beak than a snout.
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Artifacts in Fluttershy’s mouth and her left eyelashes.
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Rainbow’s eyelashes have a gap on her right eye.
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Twilight’s eyes and eyelashes merge, and her horn is a blob.
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Two mouths? Extended nostrils?
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Weird artifacts along both eyebrows.
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The Popeye mouth may pass as a stylistic choice, but that human ear popping out of her jaw does not. Nor her right cheek being torn into by her hand like that.
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AJ’s right iris is messed up. Teeth also too far forward / no upper lip.
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Pinkie’s grin is so big the AI started to give her a third row of teeth.
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The mouth is a mess.
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AJ’s upper lip is missing a chunk.
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Double mouth, and eyes are a mess.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Odd line above Rarity’s right eyebrow, could be interpreted as a stray hair.
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Snout and mouth, these sort of lines not connecting is normal in various styles.
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AJ has four freckles instead of three. That’s OK. The eyes aren’t great, but at the image’s size it’s not a major issue.
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Iris / pupil shapes aren’t perfect, but not too bad either. Vague muzzle outline is again OK for cartoonish styles (and AI really likes four freckes…)
F - Bad Anatomy - Background Characters
They may be in the background, but they shouldn’t look like they’re from The Thing. Background characters shouldn’t look deformed, unnaturally blurry, or otherwise “wrong”. AI tools allow to very easily render a full proper character, scale them down to size, and set in the background… or just remove them entirely.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Fluttershy town in itself not an issue, but those clones should look like Fluttershy.
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Massive change in quality between main character and the backgrounder behind her tail.
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Character on right has merging flesh, blobface, different ear colours, etc.
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Character behind Fluttershy’s wing suddenly missing his legs.
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The two characters on the left are noticeably low quality, and the Fluttershy clone on the right is a mess.
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Dr. Moreau’s freak on the left, and eerie no-faces on the right.
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All characters are low detail and missing important elements.
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Center Twilight has five legs, low detail aside.
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Characters in the background are a mess.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Jazz hands! None of the background characters are defined enough to look noticeably wrong, and are consistent in their lack of definition.
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Same as above, and there’s no law against humans and anthros in the same image.
Yet.
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Undefined colour blobs as background characters, not enough definition to be “wrong”.
G - Poor Details on Focus Items
Items a character is interacting with, are wearing, are an important feature in the image, etc. are expected to look like the thing they’re supposed to be and present no obvious errors.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Book is both open and closed.
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Neck on Lyra’s glass is broken, left stool has the foot ring fully on the other side, center’s is missing half, and right’s is even worse.
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Perspective for the gun changes from the muzzle to the grip
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Even if this is mocking stock photos or some pro-gamer Tekken 6 scheme, the controller is a vague blobby mess.
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Tiny car with a weird hood, and random sci-fi looking thing out of place on the right.
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The car version of The Thing after getting caught.
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Spear shaft shifts on passing behind Rainbow’s leg.
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Busted feather duster, plus a weird way to hold it.
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That beach chair would snap immediately, and one of the supports on the back vanishes.
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Weird mess on Stellar’s collar, AI couldn’t decide in time whether to make a gem or a bow. Her earring isn’t doing too great, either.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Bad hands aside, it being one feather (along with her expression) could be a joke.
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The chair’s design is dubious at best, but not an immediate disaster.
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Is the apple falling? Tossed at her? Levitated? A mystery, but at least it’s clearly an apple.
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Neck-bowtie combo is a bold choice, but Fancy Pants probably knows avant garde fashion better than us.
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Low detail aside, a split like this could be argued as Pinkie holding two different spears.
H - Bad Perspective or Background Elements
Perspective shifts along the image, objects impossibly moving from behind to in front of objects, MC Escher style illusions, background objects that don’t make any sense… it may pass muster at first glance, but once you see it, the image is ruined.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Rainbow’s right hand moves out and behind a window that’d be far behind her.
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For this to work, the table would be far offset and not in front of the couch, and Vinyl’s legs very long and tapered. Impossible.
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The fencing is a complete mess and the building is just made up of “building-like” pieces.
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The perspective of the counter and the plate resting on it are noticeably different.
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Like the Vinyl image the couch, table, and pose are impossible.
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Table has two stands, and the base overlaps the chair legs.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Nothing looks quite right, but also nothing blatantly wrong. The beams are kind of all over the place, but I’ve seen worse IRL.
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Tiny house or huge Fluttershy? It may not have been intentional, but there’s plenty of art with this sort of theme.
Fluttershy
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Those apples at the barn are huge. But maybe they’re just decoration. Or maybe the Apple family really does produce overgrown apples. It’s not ideal and it’s distracting, but not worth arguing it’s impossible.
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Backgrounds being blurry is never an issue if the blur is “right”; the concern would be the yellow thing behind Applejack. Maybe it’s a balloon, or an explosion… it’s undefined enough to not be anything we could say is “wrong”. Ideally, would be cleaned up.
I - Artifacting and Color Anomalies
Needs more jpeg, inexplicable artifacts, banding, etc.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Oversaturation to the point there’s odd bleeding and it’s almost painful to look at.
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Super high contrast, wobbly lines, bad borders…
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Extreme artifacting around object borders, looks like an MSPaint copy-paste edit.
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Banding, weird artifacts, colour shifts…
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Colours are washed out, but that’s an aesthetic.
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Neon colours and strong contrasts, but intentional.
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The outline isn’t bad or crunchy, and the weird eyes/tears likely intentional.
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Bonus Trixie.
J - Text and Lettering Errors
Text doesn’t have to be English or any real language, or even use real characters (see written equestrian, aka “ponish”), unless it’s important to the images. Text that “is meant to be read”, like dialogue in comics, chat messages on a phone screen, or anything else meant to convey important information, should be in a real language and legible.
Even for “ponish”, fake text in an image shouldn’t appear to be inexplicably blurry or artifacted; strange letters are OK, but their style should appear to resemble a consistent legible language and not be just scrawls and squiggles. “Zalgo text” should only be present in images with appropriate themes.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Is Stellar confused about Appallosean courting rituals, or concerned Braeburn popped a disk? Who knows. Comics should have legible text.
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The “?” alone would’ve made for a decent image, but the line of dialogue is just scratches.
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For a fashion magazine cover, the focus would be the photo/model, so fake “ponish” language is fine. And the big magazine title text is OK; however, the smaller text is mostly just chicken scratches.
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An image like this would have a heavy text focus, so the text should be fully legible.
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The text almost looks like real letters and words, might even pass as such as a thumbnail. But it isn’t, and is also heavily artifacted.
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Illegible nonsense.
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The sign is in focus, and it both doesn’t make any sense and suffers from artifacting / smudging.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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The words in the poster aren’t a big focus of the image, and the odd characters can be passed off as “ponish”.
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The sign at the top isn’t too prominent nor seems important, and the overall lack of detail is consistent with the rest of the background; it could pass as “normal ponish”.
K - Character Not Recognizable
This is essentially the general Rule #3 “Not Pony Related” rule applied to AI. Just because there are some pony-related elements in the image (like a cutie mark logo or background) doesn’t make a random furry OC image acceptable, as it’d be the same principle as slapping in a stock pony vector onto it instead.
Pony (and canon anthro species) characters can miss the mark, so long as the result either appears to be a completely different character, or a justifiable alteration such as different hairstyle, scars, different clothes, etc.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Someone can probably guess which pony this humanization is supposed to be, but nobody should be having to guess at all.
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This was an attempt at anthro Crackle, but there are too many elements that are off (eye colour, snout shape, horn shape, wings and spines colours, missing embedded gems…) to be anything more than a 4 armed scalie.
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Spike and Peewee? No just a random dragon and bird.
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Meant to be Fancy Pants, but completely different clothing, missing monocle, very different facial hair, etc. Just some guy in Ponyville.
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This isn’t a Diamond Dog OC, it’s just am anthro wolf.
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Pharynx, apparently. Absolutely nothing to hint that. There being Canterlot in the background isn’t enough to excuse that the focus of the image is some random human.
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The mane and tail styles being completely different strongly spells out this was the AI going rogue and the result doesn’t make much sense on its own. Should this be part of a TF sequence or some other plausible explanation, then it wouldn’t be an issue.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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Different hair colour is fine, and there are popular fanon interpretations of Luna with similar.
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Two random anthro pony OCs
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Just Starlight Glimmer with an alternate hairstyle.
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Arguably an OC that’s a super big fan of Luna.
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Was an attempt at Luna that came out very not Luna, but consistent in their own design. “Happy accidents”.
L - Wrong Core Character Details
Some immutable character details are fairly important! Hairstyles and clothes can easily change, but eye colours or cutie marks don’t.
Most of these details are very easy to spot, and trivial to fix through AI or basic external editing: getting these wrong, or their detail being poor, is likely to be considered a sign that there was little care or work put into the ai composition and thus below the quality bar we expect.
Examples of issues that would result in deletion:
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Rainbow’s cutie mark is very low quality, doesn’t look like an actual lightning bolt and has smudging artifacts.
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Stellar Flare’s cutie mark should be a spiral, not two concentric circles.
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Very bad artifacting on the cutie mark.
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The low quality cutie mark on Limestone is an issue, but more importantly is that her eye should be yellow-green.
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Almost an hour glass, but not quite. At this size/detail the fault is obvious.
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Four butterflies rather than the proper three. If the character is FiM’s Fluttershy, the cutie mark should match unless there’s a good reason for it (AU, intentional alternate design, etc.)
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Clearly meant to be Fleetfoot, but her cutie mark is wrong, and so are her eye colours.
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Vinyl’s cutie mark shouldn’t have both “note pieces” pointing inwards.
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Spoiled rich has green-turquoise eyes, not purple.
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Coco’s cutie mark only looks passable as thumbnail, but is nonsense once you actually look at it. Pretty bad for a character reference sheet.
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Chrysalis’ horn should be jagged, or a good reasoning given for why it’s not.
Examples of potential issues that would not result in deletion:
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BUT, her horn matching her getup here is fitting.
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Vinyl’s eyes were canonically revealed to be magenta, but there’s ample predating fanon of her with red eyes.
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While there’s speculation about Tempest’s cutie mark, there’s no canon one (afaik), so anything goes, including nothing.
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Rose’s cutie mark is somewhat low detail, but not noticeably so relative to the rest of the image, nor is it noticeably wrong.
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No cutie mark on anthro characters is technically fine. We however expect consistency; not one character with a cutie mark and the next without. (but really, cutie marks are important, this is MLP after all)
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Of course, kirins don’t even have cutie marks, so that’s never an issue.
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OC’s can have any cutie mark you want, it just needs to not look “broken”.
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AJ’s cutie mark has issues, but not to a point meriting image deletion.
