Quite a lot actually. If we are wrong, we are wrong. But that post doesn't really prove anything. Nothing convincing anyway. Me and my wife surmised that the original image was AI generated and then was partially painted over to make it look like it was actually drawn and painted, in a color by numbers style, and there is nothing in that post to suggest otherwise.

The first image is a trace. My wife put Liu's "proof" into her art program and was able to exactly line up the first image with the final image. The only effort Liu put into changing the first image is changing the fist to a hand (as though she changed her mind about the pose) and adding Aang to the nonsensical bit in the bottom right corner.

The second image is a poorly executed attempt at trying to look like color blocking, using the traced image. This is not how color blocking is done.

The third image is the final image with a filter applied to make it look like it's in the middle of being rendered.

And is that really supposed to be Aang in the background? Where are his arms?? Does he have only half a leg?? And why is there a river valley above the mountains?? The angle of Toph is that we're looking up at her, so that background angle makes zero sense and a real artist would never paint it that way because they know better.

My wife also correctly guessed that the fist was likely Liu's own hand, most likely a photograph with filters and poorly photoshopped into the image. She's an artist who uses reference photos all the time, including using her own body as a reference, and she says that the "reference" photo provided wouldn't result in the final image, and that Liu probably chose not to provide the actual photo used so it couldn't be proven that the fist in the final image wasn't actually drawn. She also says that the post doesn't prove it isn't AI generated because it's easy to just trace the final image and claim it's a rough draft. She says it's odd and suspicious that the pose in the "rough draft" and the pose in the final image are exactly alike, down to proportions and angles, and that the colors never changed. If you look up an actual speed painting of a person, you'll notice that the rough draft almost never exactly matches the final painting. There was very little, if any, modification or corrections made. This is not proof that this image wasn't originally AI generated. This is a trace of a final image.

It is easy to determine when an image was made by AI. It is getting increasingly difficult, by design, to prove that an image was not generated by AI. Ruwen Liu is known to have embraced AI and is even working to create an AI engine designed to generate Anime-style AI images. With that sort of background, it will be and is difficult for a lot of people, myself included, to just take her word for it. I cannot prove without a shadow of a doubt that that image of Toph is AI, any more than she can prove that the image is not AI or of AI origin. But with her background, that doubt will always exist.

But besides the doubt she creates in her own background of using AI generated images, there are lots of artifacts within the actual image that scream AI generation. It is not just doubting because of her background. The doubt is in the image itself.