About six months ago I started a weekly webcomic. I should say from the start that the character is entirely AI produced, there was no traditional artwork involved at any point. The whole experiment was testing whether I could keep one consistent face across a long serialized run without the audience catching drift.
Setup was straightforward. I created her in APOB AI, which costs nothing for everyday use and saves a character profile so it outputs a matching face every time, arranged panels in Clip Studio Paint, and kept a reference folder pinned with the original angles, expressions, and lighting I wanted to reuse every week.
For the first twenty or so strips it genuinely felt like it was working. Same face, same proportions, recognizable week to week. Readers treated her like any other webcomic protagonist. Nobody asked whether she was AI.
Around strip twenty five I started noticing something when I went back to my reference folder. The jawline had narrowed slightly. Eye spacing was maybe two percent wider. Nothing you'd catch between consecutive strips, but when I put strip one next to strip twenty five the difference was undeniable. Like seeing someone after they've gotten a haircut you can't quite place.
I kept going. At strip thirty two a reader left a comment that said something like "did you redesign the character? she looks different but I can't figure out how." That was the moment the drift crossed from my own paranoia into actual audience perception.
I went back and audited all forty strips against the original reference set. Seven needed full redraws to bring the face back toward strip one. Most of those fell in the thirty to forty range where cumulative drift had really compounded. The redraws were not perfect either, because I was now generating from a corrected reference that was itself slightly removed from the true original.
The pattern I noticed is that it isn't random noise. The face doesn't jitter around a center point. It walks slowly away from it, and it walks in a specific direction. Features that made the original character distinctive (a slightly crooked nose, an uneven smile line) gradually smoothed out. By strip forty she looked more conventionally attractive but less like herself. The drift makes faces more symmetrical and more generic over time.
I don't have a real fix for this. What I'm doing now is hard resetting to the original reference images every five strips instead of letting the most recent output become the next seed. That's cut the problem down but has not eliminated it. Seven redraws out of forty is roughly eighteen percent, which is honestly more than I had budgeted for when I started this.
The thing that still gets me is that nobody noticed strip to strip. The drift is completely invisible at one week intervals. It only becomes obvious when you compress the timeline and compare endpoints. Strip one and strip forty look like cousins, not the same person.
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