Why we built DrawDog, and what it can't do

Illustrators are being told their own work is AI. Not by detectors, but by strangers in replies, by clients who got burned once last year, by an art director who now asks how a piece was made before asking what it costs. The accusation arrives without evidence and it cannot be answered with any.

That is the whole problem, and it is worth being precise about why it is so hard. You cannot prove a negative. Every artefact you could produce after the fact, whether a time-lapse, a layered Photoshop file or a folder of dated exports, could equally have been produced after the fact by somebody faking it. A determined sceptic can wave all of it away in one sentence, and they are not being unreasonable when they do. The proof has to be made while the work is happening, or it is not proof.

The first thing it certified was the logo

This did not start from a product plan. It started because that argument kept happening and nobody had a good answer for it.

The first real certificate the system ever issued is the DrawDog logo itself. Someone sat down in Affinity Designer on September 2nd, 2026 and drew it: 5 minutes 44 seconds of drawing, 192 strokes, three saves, a file that grew from 72 bytes to 1.9 MB, and no AI tool open at any point. That record was signed, timestamped by an independent authority, and published. You can read the certificate right now and check the signature in your own browser.

It is a small session. Under six minutes, less than two hundred strokes. We are not showing you a heroic forty-hour illustration because we do not have one to show, and inventing one would make this entire project pointless. A tool that argues for honest provenance cannot start by faking its own.

What it records, and what it refuses to

The app sits in your menu bar or system tray while you work in Procreate, Photoshop, Clip Studio, Figma, or whatever you already use. It watches three things: how your file grows between saves, which application is in front, and how often the pen or mouse moves inside a drawing app.

That is the entire list. It never reads the contents of your files. It does not record file names or folder paths, does not read your screen or your window titles, and does not count keystrokes. That last one needs the same macOS permission a keylogger needs, and we do not ask for it. Quit the app and we could not tell you what your files were called, because we never knew.

When you press Certify, a summary leaves your machine. Not the work. The client opens a link, sees how long you drew and whether an AI tool was ever open, and can drop the file you sent onto the page to confirm it is byte-for-byte the one the record describes. That check runs in their browser, on their computer, not on our server. If believing a certificate required trusting us, the certificate would be worthless.

Where it fails

It is not a lie detector. This matters more than any feature.

Somebody can generate an image elsewhere, open a fresh canvas, and copy it by hand into a watched folder. DrawDog will record a real drawing session, because a real drawing session is exactly what happened. Nothing catches that. No tool can, and any tool claiming otherwise is selling you something.

It sees one computer, so work moved between machines has gaps. It does not read browser tabs, which means the growing number of AI tools that live in a browser are invisible to it as tools. Time spent in a browser is reported as browser time and never assumed innocent, but that is a blunt instrument rather than a precise one. Certificates on iPad work differently and more weakly, because iPadOS forbids the kind of background observation the desktop version depends on. The full method lists all of this in more detail than most people will want.

What DrawDog does is narrower than "proves a human made it", which is why the grades exist. No AI open plus a watched session gets certified. AI used and disclosed gets a different grade that says so, because everyone uses these tools a bit now and a product that pretends otherwise gets caught out inside a month. A session we did not see enough of gets recorded and not certified, even when no AI was involved. Absence of evidence never becomes evidence of absence.

The honest summary is that it makes faking the work cost more than doing the work. That is a smaller claim than the one you would prefer, and it is the one we can stand behind.

It goes live on Product Hunt on September 10th

DrawDog launches on Product Hunt at 12:01am on September 10th. If you have ever had to answer that accusation, or you are an art director who has had to ask the question and hated asking it, the launch page is here: DrawDog on Product Hunt. An upvote genuinely moves this in front of more of the people it was built for.

Three certificates a month are free and always will be, with no card. The app runs on macOS and Windows, and there is a browser version for Procreate files if you work on an iPad and would rather not install anything.

One last piece of housekeeping, in the spirit of the rest of this. The Mac build is not yet notarized by Apple, so the first time you open it macOS will warn you about an unidentified developer. That is being fixed. We would rather tell you now than have you find out at the worst moment.