What our 1,231 published images were still carrying, read byte by byte on September 18, 2026. Chart: RealAIGirls.
What our 1,231 published images were still carrying, read byte by byte on September 18, 2026. Chart: RealAIGirls.
Your prompt, your seed and your model can ride along inside the file you post. We measured exactly how often ours did.
Every AI image you post is two things. The picture, and whatever the file quietly carries along with it.
We wanted to know what ours were carrying. So on September 18, 2026 we pulled every image in the realaigirls.com image folder, 1,231 files and 638.7 MB, and read the metadata byte by byte. We sorted each file by its actual signature, not its extension: 652 JPEGs, 394 WebPs and 185 PNGs.
The short version: the JPEGs and WebPs were almost clean. The PNGs weren’t even close.
136 of our 185 PNGs still had a text chunk called parameters. That’s what Stable Diffusion front ends like Automatic1111 and Forge write by default, and it’s the full recipe for the image:
With the model, the seed and those settings, someone can get very close to regenerating the exact image, then tweak one word and make their own version of your work. If you sell prompts, run a paid gallery or just don’t want your process copied, that’s your whole edge sitting in a file you gave away.
It isn’t about size. The median parameters block was 920 bytes. All 136 of them together came to 126,852 bytes. Stripping them won’t make a page faster. It’s purely about what you’re disclosing.
One more thing we didn’t expect: 88 of those 136 files had the seed right in the file name too, because Automatic1111 names files as a counter followed by the seed. So even a clean file can give the seed away if the name wasn’t changed.
A different group of 49 PNGs carried a C2PA content credential, the signed provenance record that ChatGPT attaches to images it makes. Inside the block we found the strings ChatGPT, OpenAI and GPT 4o, plus Truepic, the company whose certificate signs the record.
These are much bigger. The median credential was 59,522 bytes, and across those 49 files it was 2.4 percent of every byte. All 49 together came to about 2.97 MB.
No file had both. The Stable Diffusion images carried a recipe, the ChatGPT images carried a signature, and none carried the two at once.
A content credential is a different call than a prompt. It doesn’t reveal your prompt. It says the image came from an AI tool, and some platforms read it to label AI content. On a site like ours that says everything is AI up front, keeping it costs nothing but bytes. If you do strip it, know that you’re removing the proof, not just the weight.
This is the one to check in your own folder. 24 files had an extension that didn’t match what was inside. 23 of them were PNGs named .jpg or .jpeg, and all 23 still carried the full prompt.
That happens when someone renames a file instead of converting it. The name says JPEG, so you assume the PNG text chunks are gone. They aren’t. Renaming changes nothing inside the file.
That lines up with how our images got made. The JPEGs and WebPs were exported or converted, and conversion is what threw the text away.
We tested it on two of our own files: one Stable Diffusion PNG with a parameters chunk, and one ChatGPT PNG with a content credential. Opening each in Pillow and saving it again, either as PNG or as WebP at quality 80, dropped the parameters text and the credential both times.
So here’s the short checklist:
If you want the size side of this, our WebP versus JPEG measurements show what converting does to the bytes. This one’s about what converting does to everything else.
Method: every PNG, JPEG and WebP in the realaigirls.com image folder, downloaded September 18, 2026. Each file was typed by its signature bytes, then walked chunk by chunk (PNG text, eXIf and caBX chunks; JPEG APP and comment segments; WebP EXIF, XMP and ICCP chunks). One file failed to download and isn’t counted. Resave tests used Pillow.