What we measured

We read illustrations in circulation and counted how often a provenance record survives in the file. We do not keep the images — only the values read from them.

Measured on: 2026-10-20

In short

Of the 23,809 images that came through x.com, 12 (0.1%) still carried a provenance record.
Through the same route (i.pximg.net), PNG kept it 66.3% of the time against 0.0% for JPEG.
The most common surviving drawing-software record is CLIP STUDIO PAINT (4,877 images).

How much survives, by the route it came through

The same population, split by where the image was picked up. Only routes with 50 images or more are shown.

Picked up from	Images	With a record	Rate	JPEG
x.com	23,809	12	0.1%	96.9%
i.pximg.net	17,008	4,965	29.2%	55.9%
www.xiaohongshu.com	736	80	10.9%	54.1%
twitter.com	717	2	0.3%	95.7%
www.bilibili.com	665	127	19.1%	70.5%
bsky.app	558	1	0.2%	97.7%
www.weibo.com	236	0	0.0%	99.6%
www.deviantart.com	210	69	32.9%	59.5%
e-hentai.org	200	51	25.5%	48.5%
www.mihuashi.com	194	38	19.6%	62.9%
bluearchive.wiki	120	0	0.0%	0.0%
www.instagram.com	108	0	0.0%	84.3%
arca.live	99	0	0.0%	19.2%
www.spriters-resource.com	97	22	22.7%	0.0%
www.artstation.com	76	4	5.3%	98.7%
drive.google.com	75	13	17.3%	16.0%
www.reddit.com	69	5	7.2%	37.7%
mltd.matsurihi.me	62	0	0.0%	0.0%
c10.patreonusercontent.com	60	32	53.3%	31.7%
static.wikia.nocookie.net	57	2	3.5%	29.8%
misskey.io	57	19	33.3%	3.5%
skeb.jp	52	1	1.9%	28.8%

Same route, different format

Format shows the mechanism more clearly than route. Only pairs with 100 images or more are shown.

Picked up from	Format	Images	With a record	Rate
x.com	JPEG	23,082	1	0.0%
i.pximg.net	JPEG	9,513	0	0.0%
i.pximg.net	PNG	7,494	4,965	66.3%
x.com	PNG	727	11	1.5%
twitter.com	JPEG	686	0	0.0%
bsky.app	JPEG	545	0	0.0%
www.bilibili.com	JPEG	469	84	17.9%
www.xiaohongshu.com	JPEG	398	45	11.3%
www.xiaohongshu.com	PNG	264	35	13.3%
www.weibo.com	JPEG	235	0	0.0%
www.bilibili.com	PNG	196	43	21.9%
www.deviantart.com	JPEG	125	47	37.6%
www.mihuashi.com	JPEG	122	29	23.8%
bluearchive.wiki	PNG	120	0	0.0%
e-hentai.org	PNG	102	31	30.4%

What the C2PA signatures said

AI	619	93.2%
その他	38	5.7%
人の道具	7	1.1%

Drawing software records that survived

CLIP STUDIO PAINT	4,877
Photoshop(Web用に保存)	306
Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Windows	89
Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 (Windows)	87
Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)	67
Adobe Photoshop 21.0 (Windows)	51
Adobe Photoshop CC (Windows)	51
Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 (Windows)	41

How we counted

Sample: posts on Danbooru from 2026 onward without an AI tag (49,649 images). The whole sample set is 66,209 images.
A "provenance record" means any of: a C2PA signature, a drawing software name, a camera make or model, or a capture time.
We split by the source each post records. We do not keep the images — only the values read from them.

What this does not say

It does not say the artists are the same. The sample carries no author field, so we have not checked whether work picked up from x.com and from pixiv came from the same people. We cannot rule out that the difference between routes reflects different artists.
For C2PA we counted that a signature is present. We did not verify that the signature is genuine in this tally.
An absent record is not evidence of AI. Most of the time it was simply dropped along the way.

How to check it yourself

To count again, collect the sample and run the following. How the sample is collected is written in lab/README.md (the images are not kept in the repository).

python lab/corpus_export.py <features.jsonl> web/src/data/measurements.json

How to cite

Fudemark (WAAI), "What we measured", 2026-10-20, https://fudemark.wasabigarden.tech/en/measurements/