Artist: dappytime (locked)

Staff members involved: binaryfloof, Manitka, Catt0s, Swedistan Doge, abadbird, Wandering Spaniel, Recursion, Lafcadio

Over the course of 2025-08-14, staff members brought up and dissected various posts by this artist, noting highly inconsistent styles, and speedpaints with improbable processes. Of particular note is that one process remained entirely realistic even when the others did not: https://x.com/DappyTime/status/1932105387828027833. It was then established that DappyTime had previous AI usage on a personal website, which they (seemingly) washed their hands of with a public admission and by taking down their personal site. Yet in spite of this, a few posts had telltale signs associated with low-effort AI generations and artist style emulation.

Lafcadio's first response, starting at 2025-08-16, was that the backgrounds shown were entirely unrealistic, and the word choice on DappyTime's Archive of Our Own had several baffling patterns consistent with AI text generation.

Further investigation by Lafcadio also revealed a series of simpler posts that were likely to be the artist's true skill level, and a few posts made in the style of specific artists. He would later mention these exact posts publicly: post #5759999 was likely innocent, post #5763060 was based on an AI model trained on Dagasi's work, and post #5791877 was based on an AI model trained on Syuro's work.

Making notes of these, he processed the deletion of several posts, only excluding the more cartoony pieces that DappyTime could realistically produce.

DappyTime attempted to conduct an appeal via DMail with Lafcadio on the 17th; the items were passed on for internal review, but Lafcadio openly admitted: "I'm not a fan of what I'm seeing here, lots of details consistent with other artists tracing AI images, and it is evident to me that there is a long pattern of creative fraud that is being covered up in the interest of soliciting commissions. For these reasons, I am not interested in restoring the affected posts."

The pattern of DappyTime posts being uploaded and then deleted continued; after the deletion of post #5828317 on 2025-09-07, Lafcadio received an additional DMail offering speed-paints, and replied as follows: "If there are specific items you want to highlight for re-review then I invite you to hop into our Discord server and appeal there to get it seen by other janitorial staff, as well as to better establish timelines/rationale related to previous AI image/text usage."

This finally resulted in DappyTime's final appeal on 2025-09-08. Lafcadio opened up by asking about:

• the previous admission of AI-generated image usage on DappyTime's personal website.
• how the Peruvian author came to write English-language fanfiction for an English-language audience.
• potential AI text generation usage.

After DappyTime maintained innocence regarding AI text generation, Lafcadio presented this series of replies:

I'm seeing issues in your AO3 that are consistent with AI-generated text, actually. For instance, did you know you have the words "the intensity of the (blank)"...

• 90 times in "Secrets of Horny Warrior Cats"
• 26 times in "Horny Lions in the Savannah"
• 7 times in "A World Full of Horny Pokémon"
• 6 times in "Horny Ponies in Equestria"
• 9 times in "The Shadow of Tigerstar"
• 3 times in "Bluestar's Secret"
• 0 times in "A Cave for Two"
• 0 times in "Stay Here, Rusty!"

"chest rising and falling":

• 15 times in "Bluestar's Secret"
• 1 time in "The Shadow of Tigerstar"
• 2 times in "Horny Ponies in Equestria"
• 4 times in "A World Full of Horny Pokémon"
• 26 times in "Horny Lions in the Savannah"
• 0 times in "Stay Here, Rusty!"
• 28 times in "Secrets of Horny Warrior Cats"
• 6 times in "A Cave for Two"

"the sensation of":

• 4 times in "Bluestar's Secret"
• 9 times in "The Shadow of Tigerstar"
• 2 times in "Horny Ponies in Equestria"
• 50 times in "A World Full of Horny Pokémon"
• 33 times in "Horny Lions in the Savannah"
• 1 time in "Stay Here, Rusty!"
• 73 times in "Secrets of Horny Warrior Cats"
• 2 times in "A Cave for Two"

"didn't respond immediately":

• 24 times in "Bluestar's Secret"
• 0 times in "The Shadow of Tigerstar"
• 0 times in "Horny Ponies in Equestria"
• 0 times in "A World Full of Horny Pokémon"
• 3 times in "Horny Lions in the Savannah"
• 0 times in "Stay Here, Rusty!"
• 6 times in "Secrets of Horny Warrior Cats"
• 0 times in "A Cave for Two"

There are more besides these, but in particular, I'd like to highlight "delicious ease" appearing three times in one chapter of "Secrets of Horny Warrior Cats" and absolutely nowhere else. None of the other chapters in the same work, and none of the other works, have this phrase.

These patterns do not suggest an artist naturally having a few favorite phrases, or deliberate editing to remove repetition, but mere luck dictating if ChatGPT/DeepSeek/etc. decides a pair "experience an intensity that left them both breathless", if a character whispers their voice, if they completely surrender to him/her/passion/ecstacy/sensation, etc.

The thing about AI text generation is that context determines behaviors. DeepSeek in particular really loves to repeat itself, in addition to certain models just having favorite phrases on their own. There are entire word/token lists that exist solely to make LLMs use these phrases less often in creative writing. If an LLM rolls "the intensity of the (X)" once, that's staying in context for a while; the LLM is likely to reuse the same phrasing because, well, complementing the context is good!

All of your AO3 fics, except Shadow of Tigerstar, are from this year. Most of them are from as recent as May. And if you did have some favorite phrases, the distribution wouldn't be nearly so odd. You have "chest rising" once in "Stay Here, Rusty!" but not the falling part.

We also have several more oddities like rule of three, negative parallelisms, and a combined 2,182 em-dashes across all your chapters. Of these, only "Horny Ponies in Equestria" lacks any, and that is just a single chapter. I completely believe that more would've popped up if you had gotten to making more My Little Pony chapters.

For comparison, I've picked out a series from AO3 called "My Obsession". This predates AI text generation tools like ChatGPT by about a year, so it's easy to assume this author's works are 100% human-written. For the sake of establishing scale: your AO3 contributions include 718,723 words, "My Obsession" consists of 70,141 words.

"My Obsession"'s list of most reused phrases is as follows:

• you force yourself: 10 times.
• try to think of: 9 times.
• back into your chair: 6 times.

Basically everything else is 5 times or fewer, including phrases like "one of your daughters". 10 counts of "you force yourself" is maybe the only real outlier, but it's a story about the protagonist ("you") being abducted, sexually assaulted, and then taking it upon themself to raise the resultant daughters. A father forcing himself to do things he doesn't really want to is pretty natural in such a story.

A pretty major difference is that there is not a single em-dash anywhere in the text of My Obsession. Not one. If they had a similar writing style to you, we would expect somewhere in the range of 200 em-dashes. Instead, this writer uses normal hyphens, even in places where an em-dash would make sense.

In response, DappyTime voluntarily left the Discord server, at which point none of the staff reported having any further contact with them. However, uploads from DappyTime's verified account continued (something which was attempted multiple times between their appeal attempts), as if they hoped they could evade notice by uploading posts and not engaging with or acknowledging Lafcadio. The janitorial staff agreed on 2025-09-11 that the nature of DappyTime's uploads remained suspicious, and the abandoned appeal was not sufficient to treat their art as universally human-made, so uploads were intentionally disabled on their account. Lafcadio sent a DMail explaining the decision.

No further attempts were made by DappyTime to communicate with Lafcadio, but since then various third parties began trying to appeal on DappyTime's behalf; in all cases, the rest of the janitorial staff were notified of the attempted appeals, and Lafcadio responded to all of these accounts by providing a public statement for them.