Artist: kuru tyan (locked)
Potential AI Art Warning
An e621 staff investigation has previously concluded that some or all works from this artist are likely AI-assisted/generated. Please be aware of this when posting works from this artist.
2025-11-01
Staff members involved: Lafcadio, Manitka, spe
Throughout this report, any date marked with an asterisk (*) indicates a date where an image was posted to Fur Affinity but later deleted. Several of the deleted items are YCH advertisements that predate furry image generation. Do not treat the deletion of Kuru_tyan's Fur Affinity posts as an admission of guilt.
Kuru_tyan first registered to Fur Affinity on March 3, 2018. Before the release of Stable Diffusion in 2022-08-22, and the release of furry models such as yiffy-e8 in October 2022, they uploaded 35 images to Fur Affinity, including a short series of My Little Pony images and a few stylized characters with long, narrow snouts. 33 more images were submitted after the release of Stable Diffusion. The 33 newer posts show styles and subject material that are consistent with their early 2022 works, and use of AI assistance in these cases is extremely unlikely.
In spite of a long history of MLP YCHs, Kuru_tyan stopped producing MLP art after posting a finished YCH in 2023-05-23* (only returning to drawing anthrofied MLP characters a few times in 2025). There was no further activity from this artist until posting a Lovander illustration on 2024-02-06*, 8 months later. 5 months later, they then posted Booba on 2024-07-29. Starting with the Lovander image, they exhibited a different style including broader/shorter snouts and the occasional pair of puckered lips.
On 2024-08-03*, they posted an image of Dr. Monique Pussycat, showing a remarkably different coloring style and facial structure. Starting from this point on, a notable shift occurred, where compositions would slowly trend towards those popular with AI generations, coloring consistent with AI-generated images would suddenly appear despite not being consistent with previous works, and different attempts at the same characters would suddenly yield very different results despite only being months apart. Versions of Loona, Roxy, Judy Hopps, Shikabane, and more that did not resemble the artist's previous work, but those found in common AI models based on the Pony and Illustrious checkpoints.
From December 2024 to January 2025, Kuru_tyan began a pattern of image compositions with tendencies commonly found in AI-generated work, including a piece of Suurin 2 fanart that again saw a significant stylistic shift from their own work which they did not return to.
Starting in 2025-01-20, Kuru_tyan posted a series of images highly consistent with Illustrious generations, starting a streak of near-daily image posts, with several days having two or more images shared. The only significant gaps in activity were from 2025-03-02 to 2025-03-09 (a single image of Roxanne Wolf was posted during this time and then deleted, as evidenced by quote tweets from the artist), a brief span from 2025-03-13 to 2025-04-06 where the only media posts from the account were reposts and cropped Patreon promotions, and they otherwise maintained high activity throughout the entire year.
On 2025-05-16, the artist posted a video where they demonstrated the physical existence of a notebook showing a simple line drawing. Another paper drawing was produced 2025-07-03, showing lineart of Kuru_tyan's dog character sitting atop a GIGABYTE-branded GEFORCE RTX graphics card.
The legitimacy of traditional art is only tangentially related to e621's AI art investigations, as the shift to a different medium destroys a lot of the most obvious tells, but in previous cases it has been observed that fraudulent artists can perform on paper. tsunoart successfully appealed once when they demonstrated the ability to draw on paper, but when later confronted with the existence of their Etsy/Gumroad stores with AI-generated image materials, they silently deleted the store listing and abandoned their Twitter account. The existence of Kuru_tyan's traditional drawings is not sufficient to clear them of AI-assisted lineart or coloring. Without a recording of the actual drawing process, it is functionally impossible to distinguish between images traced directly from AI, images drawn with an AI reference available nearby, or completely human-made art.
Around the time of some AI-assisted Mal0 posts from Kuru_tyan, an artist named "Hellhounduwu" came into existence, posting a small number of AI-assisted Loona images from late February to late March. After this time, they deleted their Patreon, blanked their Twitter account, and abandoned their Fur Affinity account with no further activity. At the time of writing, Hellhounduwu's only followed accounts on Twitter are @helicopterfood and @bigfootjinx, and their Fur Affinity includes a Patreon advertisement image that is in-style with Kuru_tyan's own promotional images on Twitter, and a retweet goal strip meme image with a similar format to Kuru_tyan's own work. Hellhounduwu and Kuru_tyan are considered to be the same person.
The finger of suspicion would be pointed a few times by e621 commenters and janitors, as well as anonymous posters on 4chan's /trash/, but these did not result in detailed investigations until much later. Lafcadio looked into Kuru_tyan and 6 other artists from 2025-11-01 to 2025-11-02 in order to resolve a few cases that were not being actively looked into while the janitorial team handled various tasks unrelated to AI.
Two video recordings were submitted to e621's janitorial team (through a DMail to Lafcadio). A reasonable human workflow was observed that was consistent with Kuru_tyan's newest works, but several much older posts from 2023 to 2025 remained entirely unproven.
It was additionally noted that a small number of works-in-progress existed on Kuru_tyan's Patreon. Of all posts, only about 10% showed these WIPs. Of these WIPs, 10 showed linework consistent with the video recording, and the remainder did not.
The opinion of the e621 staff team is: while a subset of their newest and oldest works satisfy a certain level of proof, there are several posts in this middling range that lacks this proof and contains elements that are not present elsewhere, including their visual content, metadata, and a long period of sustained art output.
2025-12-12
Staff members involved: Lafcadio, Manitka, spe, IsFaputa
Following the previous investigation, Kuru_tyan released a sped-up drawing process for https://www.furaffinity.net/view/62878731/ (post #5956107), a month old by the time of the social media post. A few faults were found with the video that made falsifiability possible, making it difficult to accept this video as proof of innocence.
More pertinent, however, was the discovery of a few different factors: the existence of additional alternate accounts was revealed by a third party. @KURU779 had several matching images from their Fur Affinity days, while @lapalilpup, @FrostBiteNerd, and @fuwamipaws, each displayed similarities in style and themes.
Of these, the former two also had links to separate Patreon pages, a trait previously associated with both Helicopterfood and HellhoundUwU. Both Helicopterfood and FrostBiteNerd submitted similar redraws of the "why is it so small" meme. Both Helicopterfood and Lapalilpup submitted similar drawings with a handheld scanner reading "poor" or "loser", including identical cutouts in both images. Some plausible doubt exists for fuwamipaws as that account lacks an obvious Patreon, but both fuwamipaws and lapalilpup changed their Twitter usernames in November 2025.
In addition, HellhoundUwU had its following accounts removed, when Helicopterfood was previously one of the account's only two follows, and it was stealthily renamed to @justsomerandpup. With the existence of the other accounts established, it was hard to disregard this change in the account's follows and name as mere coincidence.
Following the previous investigation into Kuru_tyan's work, a potential heuristic was found for identifying AI art that seemed to endure regardless of style guidance, and even when not specifically prompted; whether a user allowed their images to have typical Pony/Illustrious styles, or they sought to imitate a different artist, certain details would seem to prevail. A re-review showed that these tells endured in both the more suspicious posts that remained deleted, and several more that were restored based on review of the artist's Patreon. While the style of the artist's works had changed, their fundamental nature did not.
The reveal of more accounts also meant that more posts were discovered that painted an increasingly improbable picture of sustained daily uploads from Kuru_tyan, with certain stretches of time such as August 2025 having two images daily. Even parts of December had significant daily gaps that, with the existence of @Lapalilpup and other accounts, are now completely filled.
Consequently, those involved in this investigation are no longer comfortable treating the existence of a couple of WIPs as proof in favor of their modern output, and the recent falsifiable video from their Twitter is also not sufficient as proof. Newer posts from this artist have been deleted as a result, leaving only posts predating the 2024-08-03 Dr. Monique Pussycat post.
The following tags are aliased to this tag: helicopterfood (learn more).