Cartoonmag Weekly | No. 69 – Abbas Naaseri: The Distinguished Judge’s Detection!
The Distinguished Judge’s Detection!
We are pleased to begin publishing Abbas Naaseri’s Weekly Single Page of Cartoonmag on feridundemir.org. We thank Abbas for his collaboration and for making his weekly writings available to our readers.
We begin with No. 69, originally published on October 10, 2026.
Weekly Single Page of Cartoonmag / No 69 / THE DISTINGUISHED JUDGE’S DETECTION!
Abbas Naaseri / These days, heated discussions among artists about works produced by artificial intelligence have become increasingly common: the inability of many judging panels to recognize and distinguish AI-generated works from original ones; the numerous awards being given to these fake works; their making it into festivals—even when the calls for entries explicitly state that AI-generated works will not be accepted—and so on.
In any case, I am no exception to this rule. For some time now, I have been paying close attention to and conducting extensive research into the errors made by artificial intelligence and the ways of identifying works generated by AI.
They say that if you think about something throughout the day, you will dream about it at night…
I suppose that, as a result of all this research and preoccupation, it seems as though my dreams, too, have been generated by artificial intelligence.
In my dreams, a hand suddenly has eight fingers instead of five. One of the characters in my dreams has an extra arm—and sometimes several. Sometimes, instead of being attached at the shoulders, the joints of my dream characters seem to protrude from their waists. A character who, for example, is holding a box may have their hand duplicated at four different points around the box. Sometimes hands and fingers pass right through an object. A hand rests on an object, but is not actually holding it…
And although scientists have not yet discovered whether dreams are experienced in color, and most studies indicate that people see their dreams in black and white, I have nevertheless been seeing my dreams in an AI-generated color palette lately as well…
So here is my question:
When it is possible to recognize AI-generated creations even in a dream, how is it that some people, while wide awake and sitting on an important judging panel, cannot distinguish AI-generated works from original ones?
Of course, I accept that with the advancement of artificial intelligence, the issue today is no longer simply “six fingers.” In the early generations of image-generating models, obvious mistakes such as extra fingers, strangely formed hands, and other anatomical errors often made AI-generated images relatively easy to identify.
But newer models have become much more sophisticated. Even recent studies show that high-quality images can be difficult to identify as AI-generated.
Yet what we continue to see in competition results and festival selections is that works whose AI-generated nature is still quite clearly detectable are appearing among the shortlisted and winning entries.
In the coming issues, we will try to examine together some of the ways of detecting fake works and distinguishing them from genuine ones.
So, please, stay with us.
This single page has been prepared to remind the news and calls published on the cartoon magazine website and it is supposed to be published every Saturday.
