I looked around and didn't see anyone talking about this, sorry if I missed any talk on it.
I'll start out by saying I can't confirm this is AI, but there's plenty here to at least suggest it is. This isn't a comprehensive breakdown of the image, but it's more than enough to show what I'm seeing.
For reference, this image was attached to his last apology post on his Patreon.
Hints at it being AI
1- Hair placement is weird here. It's hanging down like, but also in front of the shoulder. It should be behind it.
2- There's an out of place blob of blue below the hairbow.
3- A strange edge, like it has been edited to remove some other issue, but just left a large edge in its place.
4- Hair juts out way further than it should.
5- Hair goes behind the bow and ends in front of other hair in an unnatural way
6- Eyebrows have no color, and they are under the hair. His girls have eyebrows overtop their hair.
7- Ponytail feels oddly placed and doesn't feel like it matches this hairstyle. It's longer than the longest parts in the back at that.
8- Collar is way off. Cuts into neck on one side and hangs way off the other side
9- neck lines come way too far down and shoulder muscles go too far up. I will admit, this one just might be me.
10, 11, 12 and near 4- The backlighting is an absolute hodgepodge of colors. Greens, blues, yellows, etc. This does not match the background scene in anyway and would be better suited to a nightclub rave backlighting.
This image might seem similar at a glance, but it's not really his style. General thoughts on that.
-The whole neck/collarbone area is way off imo, seems like a different style entirely.
-His outlines are much in general. The image for comparison shows some of his thinner outlines and they seem thicker still.
-the hair has some hard-edged shading but the rest of it is all soft
-The bikini has folds in the fabric that are created using shading rather than hard outlines like his other outfits have.
-The level of rendering overall feels very different when put side by side with images that are in game.
I don't really care if he wants to transition to AI art, that's his call. My issue - While it wasn't explicitly stated as his work, attaching it to a post that says "I promise I'm still working on it" very much implies that this is his work and not an AI-generated image. To make it worse, it's cause he went dark for almost 4 months, after which he then went dark for another 6 months. If the best you can do in 10 months is an apology post with what seems like a single AI-generated image, then maybe it's time to reevaluate how much time you have to commit to this and share your concerns with your patrons instead of acting like everything will be fine.
Maybe he is working on it, maybe not, I'm just pointing out what I noticed.