How a verdict is made

Scope: anime illustration only

This registry covers anime and anime-style illustration — original work, fan art, commissioned pieces, and doujin work. Everything else is out of scope and gets closed without review.

Not because other fields matter less, but because a reviewer can only hold one field's conventions in their head well enough to judge process evidence fairly. Illustration is the one where that judgment is worth trusting.

The three labels

An artist can also sit at Unreviewed — indexed, but no verdict issued. That is not a soft accusation. It means nobody has looked yet.

What counts as evidence

Process is still the game, but the bar has moved. "Process is expensive to fake" was true when faking it meant drawing. A sequence of images that looks like process — rough, then flats, then rendered — is now cheap to produce, and generating plausible intermediate states is close to what these tools do natively. So the question is no longer whether process exists. It is whether it could have been assembled afterwards.

Strongest — could not have been prepared

• A live session on a prompt you have not seen. Nothing can be pre-made for a subject issued minutes earlier. This is how appeals are settled, and it is the only thing here that comes close to conclusive.
• An uncut recording of the same thing — a prompt we issued, recorded start to finish, with the prompt arriving on camera. A VOD works as well as a live call so long as the recording does not cut and the subject came from us.

Strong — expensive to fabricate backwards

• A long public archive with years of visible progression, including the bad early work.
• Verifiable professional credits, checkable against someone other than the artist.
• A native source file with its operation history intact — a .clip or .procreate saved with recording on. That history lives inside the file and cannot be generated afterwards, so a document assembled from a finished image either has no history at all or has one showing the assembly: importing, masking, erasing. Send the original file, not a .psd — exporting to PSD discards it.
• Layered files that show searching — hidden discards, abandoned passes, corrections — rather than a tidy stack that could have been cut from a finished image.

Weaker than it used to be

• Timelapses on their own. These were near-decisive a few years ago and are not any more.
• WIP posts and sketch stages on their own — the same problem: images in a sequence.
• Streams, unless the drawing stays continuously visible and unbroken.

None of these are worthless. A timelapse still supports a case built on other things, and its absence means nothing at all. They just no longer carry a verdict on their own.

One caveat on artefacts, because the list below is easy to over-read. Generated images fail in ways drawings do not — errors that are structurally impossible rather than merely inaccurate, detail that dissolves the longer you look at it instead of being simplified on purpose. That character is something we weigh, and reading it is most of what an appraising eye is for. What we do not weigh is the mere presence of a mistake.

Not evidence

• “It looks AI.” Style is not evidence.
• Detector-tool screenshots. They are unreliable in both directions.
• A badly drawn hand. People draw hands badly — an error is not a signature.
• Fast output. Some people are just fast.
• A clean feed with no WIPs — common for finished-work-only accounts.
• Pile-ons and quote-tweet consensus.

When evidence is thin in both directions, the honest answer is Uncertain, and that is what gets published. We would rather post a shrug than a guess.

Fast path for established artists

Some artists can be resolved in minutes because the record is already public. Those skip the queue. Any one of these, independently verifiable, qualifies:

• Professional credits — credited work on a published anime, manga, game, light novel or album, checkable against a public database or the publisher's own credits.
• Portfolio with depth — a public archive predating the current work by years, showing progression rather than a sudden arrival.
• Documented process at scale — a standing habit of timelapses, WIP threads, or drawing streams sustained across many pieces and years. This is a claim about the visibility of the record, not proof of authorship on its own — see the tiers above.
• Commercial trail — commission history, convention or storefront presence, client work that can be confirmed with the client.
• Institutional record — art-school or studio affiliation, competition placements, published interviews about the work.

Fast path speeds up when we look, never how hard. Entries cleared this way are marked Fast path so you can see why it moved quickly.

Only claim it if it is obvious. Fast path is for veterans whose record is already public and substantial — clear professional work, a large established account, years of visible output. Claiming it for a smaller or lesser-known artist to jump the queue is counted as abuse, and that request is closed without review — whether or not the claim about the artist turns out to be true. It is a claim about how public the record is, not about whether the work is real.

The queue

20 slots, free, worked in the order requests arrive. Review time is the bottleneck, so intake is capped rather than letting a backlog grow that nobody will ever clear. A slot reopens the moment a request resolves.

There is no paid lane and no way to buy a place in line. Artists contesting their own entry skip the queue entirely — see appeals below. Current queue state →

Appeals: the live session

Any artist can contest their own entry. Appeals skip the queue, and opening one immediately flips the entry to verification pending, so readers can see the label is disputed while it is being looked at again.

This is one person, not a support desk. Sessions happen when a slot can genuinely be found on both sides, which can take days and sometimes longer. If you are waiting, you are not being ignored.

1. You open an appeal

   From your artist page, or by DM. The entry shows as pending from that moment.

2. We confirm it is you

   A post or DM from the account under appeal. We are not asking for legal ID.

3. We agree a time and schedule the session

   20–40 minutes, in your timezone wherever that can be managed. Expect some back and forth before a slot lands.

4. You get a custom prompt at the start

   Written for your session and released when it begins, so nothing can be prepared in advance. Pitched at your own stated style — the point is not to trip you up.

5. Two captures run throughout

   Screen share of the full display, and a phone camera framing your hands and tablet. Both run for the whole block, uncut.

6. We publish the outcome

   Overturned or upheld, with a short public note on your page and the appeal recorded in its history. You do not need to finish a piece — process is what is being checked.

Limits worth stating plainly

• This is human judgment on public evidence. It is not proof, and it can be wrong.
• A verdict describes the work we reviewed, at the date shown — not everything an artist has ever posted, and not their future work.
• Uncertain means uncertain. It is not code for “probably AI”.
• Absence from the index means nobody submitted the artist. It is not a clean bill and not a suspicion.
• Using this registry to harass anyone is against the point of it, and gets submitters blocked.