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According to industry data, collectors are using documents produced by artificial intelligence to “prove” the authenticity and ownership of artworks when obtaining appraisals or making insurance claims.
“Chatbots and LLMs (large language models) are helping fraudsters create sales invoices, appraisals, provenance documents and certificates of authenticity,” said Olivia Eccleston, fine art insurance broker at Marsh.
This trend, he said, has “added a new dimension to the age-old problem of fakes and fraud in the art market”.
A fine art loss adjuster, who reviews claims on behalf of insurers, was sent dozens of certificates of appraisal as part of an insurance claim on a collection of decorative paintings.
Although the certificates initially seemed credible, the adjuster told the Financial Times that the description fields were the same for each specific job. The claimant’s apparent oversight led the adjuster to suspect that the certificates were prepared with an automated writing system.
Industry figures said some use of AI was malicious, including deliberate attempts to forge provenance documents. Other examples occurred when people asked AI models to find references to their artwork in historical databases and it “confused” the results.
Provenance is a term used in the art market to denote the chain of ownership of an artwork.
Angelina Giovanni, co-founder of art provenance researchers Flynn & Giovanni, said it was easy to use the AI to create fake results because it was “quite conspiratorial… It has to come up with an answer, so if you give it enough information, it will guess something”.
Giovanni, who is developing an app to encourage global provenance research, said she had seen a document with a painting where AI was apparently used to apply a signature to the painting.
Experts say such use of AI is a new twist on old practices.
Where in the past people would steal or mock the letterheads of prestigious institutions to show authenticity, now they are using AI, said Filippo Guerrini-Maraldi, head of fine art at insurer Howden.
“I’ve seen a lot of forged documents in my career. It’s not necessarily a new thing – but what AI has done is made it more realistic,” he said.
Art forgers traditionally counterfeit not only paintings but also the important documents that accompany them. Without this paperwork the works may be considered worthless.
Giovanni said he had seen fake ledger numbers and forged Nazi stamps on provenance documents.
Wolfgang Beltracchi, who painted hundreds of works, including some by Max Ernst and Fernand Léger, also created fake photographs to create the provenance of his works.
Harry Smith, executive chairman of art appraisers Gur Johns, said: “AI makes what has been going on for a long time a little easier and a little faster. You don’t have to dream up a professorial expert – you can just get the job done by AI.”
Grace Best-Devereaux, fine art loss adjuster at claims specialist Sedgwick, told the FT that she was examining metadata on digitally filed documents for clues about AI interference.
He said loss adjusters have also used AI tools to help authenticate provenance documents. However, recent improvements in AI have made fraud more difficult to spot, even for experts, Best-Deveraux said. “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’.”
