5chers Get Hooked on Making AI Art Characters — “The Fingers Look Off, Let Me Post a Different One… Wait, That’s a Dude”

Background and Key Points

This isn’t much of a debate thread — it’s mostly a rapid-fire posting gallery — so the commentary should lean on background rather than pretend there was a real split.

5ch’s Newsspeed VIP board (通称”なんJVIP” or just “VIP”) is one of the oldest and most freewheeling boards on Japan’s largest anonymous forum network, known for absurdist humor threads that run for hundreds of posts and often spin into numbered “seasons” once a format catches on. The “Mr. AI Art” (AI絵師さん) thread format follows that pattern: someone opens a thread, generators start dumping images made with tools like Stable Diffusion or NovelAI, and the running joke is spotting the AI’s tells — warped hands, extra fingers, melted background objects — before someone posts a fix that has a new, unrelated flaw.

There isn’t really a dispute to summarize here; the posts are a loose stream of images and one-line captions rather than an argument. The closest thing to a turn is post >>134’s setup of an otoko no ko (a male character drawn in a feminine/moe style, a well-established anime-fan aesthetic distinct from simple crossdressing) followed by >>138’s admission that a “fixed” repost of a girl character turned out to be male — a punchline about AI models conflating stylistic femininity with gender that recurs in Japanese AI-art circles specifically because so much anime-style training data draws bishōnen and moe-girl characters with nearly identical facial proportions.

What outside readers may miss is scale: threads like this can run into dozens of “seasons” over months, and the appeal isn’t polished output so much as communal spectacle — mocking the tool’s failures together is the actual social activity, not the art itself.