A fan art contest entry gets its character design wrong, its 'process images' caught in a spectacular self-own, and the artist already has a prior history of AI allegations — triple threat combo, and miHoYo quietly pulled them from the winners list overnight. This might just be the most absurd fan art contest meltdown in Genshin Impact community history.
It started when Genshin Impact's official Nahida fan art contest published its winners list. Players quickly zeroed in on the 2nd-place entry, and the problems went way beyond just suspected AI use. First, as a Nahida-themed contest, the winning piece actually got her character design wrong — Nahida's and Alhaitham's hair gradients were missing, and Nahida's signature streaked highlights disappeared entirely. One commenter nailed it: "Getting the character design wrong in a Nahida-specific fan art contest and still winning 2nd place is wild."
As the discussion heated up, users dug through the artist's Weibo history. Someone posted an older piece from October 2023, pointing out the jacket fold treatment on the left side: "Anyone who's actually run image models themselves knows exactly what this looks like." But the real smoking gun came from the artist's own 'process images' they posted to defend themselves.
The so-called 'process images' turned into a full-on self-roast. Community detectives found three glaring issues. First, the fur hood's folds looked passable in the sketch stage, but the final version suddenly had bizarre shadows that made it look like the fur trim and hood were split into two separate layers of clothing. Second — and this is the kicker — the sketch clearly showed an Aranara (a cute little forest spirit from Genshin) in the top-right corner, but by the final version it had morphed into an unrecognizable blob of flowers and vegetation with consistent color but completely incoherent structure. As one user put it: "You can tell it's AI image recognition that hallucinated the Aranara into random foliage, then slapped on a Gaussian blur to hide it." Third, the character Wanderer (Scaramouche) doesn't appear anywhere in the sketch, yet he was 'thoughtfully added' to the final piece. One commenter burst out laughing: "The Aranara from the top-right of the sketch turned into a Christmas tree, and they even generously added Scaramouche who wasn't in the draft at all."
Others questioned the creative process itself: the lineart structure didn't match either the sketch or the color draft at all. "If you asked me to guess, I'd suspect they traced over an AI-generated initial image," one user said. Some pushed back, noting that sketch-to-lineart divergence alone isn't proof — "my lineart and sketch are two completely different worlds" — but the consensus was that the overall aesthetic screamed 'model style' (模型风格) at a glance.
The comments section also turned into an impromptu 'AI art detection masterclass.' Veterans explained that the old tell of counting fingers is outdated: "Now people look at more subtle things, like hair lines blending into hands." They added that "some skilled AI prompters who do post-processing cleanup afterward make it really hard to distinguish from hand-drawn art." Another user shared a lesser-known tell: "Eyelids and eyeliner are a good indicator right now — AI still doesn't understand that structure, so the lines come out wonky, uneven, and inconsistent." Someone else threw in the towel entirely: "Some of those AI artists like the ones making URDha and kenobiAI content — literal digital Taoist masters at this point. I surrender. The tech is just unstoppable."
Naturally, there were dissenting voices. One user fired back: "So anyone can just label something AI whenever they're upset? Is this what the art community has become?" and asked whether the contest even prohibited AI-assisted work. Others pointed out that human artists make mistakes too — "Hypergryph's character art regularly has broken anatomy and swapped left-right feet, you can't call that AI either." Still, the prevailing opinion leaned toward 'human-AI hybrid' at minimum. One user who reviewed the artist's full Weibo portfolio concluded: "Personally I think it's human-AI collaboration — some of the rendering techniques are too similar to common AI model outputs."
One particularly quotable commenter channeled what players call the 'Dian Wang (典王)' energy with a mock-serious quip: "Is that so? Well then, I have to say — in Genshin Impact, AI also has the right to win awards!" Peak internet comedy right there.
As of now, miHoYo has republished the winners list without this entry — an effective official acknowledgment of the controversy. But the discussion around the process image fiasco (Aranara turning into a Christmas tree, Scaramouche materializing out of nowhere, wrong character design details) continues to provide endless entertainment. This little meltdown is yet another reminder that as AI art tech keeps evolving at breakneck speed, the fairness question in fan art contests is only going to get thornier.
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