Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Willem van Elst
For hundreds of years, humans have been engaged in the fine craft of art forgery. In fact, in 1496, 21-year-old Michelangelo created a fake A. fragment of a roman statueTo make a quick buck, it was given to Roman archaeologist Cardinal Raphael Riario.
To drive away the thief, The young Florentine artist originally rubbed acidic loam – clay – onto a fragment of his own sculpture to reveal it as one of the ancient sculptures. If he had been born a few hundred years later, he would have used ChatGPT.
New reporting by financial Times Details the recent increase in art counterfeiting driven by generic AI tools. Specifically, the outlet reports that art owners are using AI-generated documents to “prove” the authenticity and provenance of various pieces, much to the frustration of fine art underwriters and brokers.
In the art world, provenance is a record of ownership of a specific piece, allowing collectors and art brokers to trace the lineage of a work.
“Chatbots and large language models (LLMs) are helping fraudsters create sales invoices, valuations, provenance documents and certificates of authenticity,” said Olivia Eccleston, a fine art broker at the insurance firm. Marsh McLennan told foot,
According to Eccleston, AI has “added a new dimension to the age-old problem of fakes and fraud in the art market.”
An insurance adjuster who spoke to the publication says he was sent dozens of certificates as part of a damage claim on a large collection of paintings. Although the documents “seemed to be corroborating”, clues in the metadata led the adjuster to conclude that the entire art collection was fake.
interesting thing foot Note that only a portion of the AI documented for fraud was intentional. In other cases, collectors used AI to trace the origins of different works in reference databases – the resulting technology causing confusion.
An analyst at art research firm Flynn & Giovanni called the AI ”pretty intriguing” in that context, saying “It has to come up with an answer, so if you give it enough information, it will guess something.”
While adjusters are also using AI to help combat the growing trend of counterfeit products, said Grace Best-Devereaux, a claims adjuster at Sedgwick, a claims investigation company. foot Given the ease with which fraudsters can now counterfeit high-potential documents, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay ahead of the curve.
“We’re at this precipice where it won’t be possible for me to look at this and say ‘the text looks wrong, and I need to investigate this further,'” he said.
More on art: Acclaimed Movie Secretly Contains AI Generated Imagery
