AI Is Our Ally—Right?

From the Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, September/October 2026, Editor’s Note:

AI Is Our Ally—Right?

In the August 2024 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur, I published an Editor’s Note titled “AI As Our Ally.” I suggested that if artificial intelligence (AI) is going to make art that can be confused (by most viewers) with the expertly handmade artworks illustrated in this magazine, then it should be explicitly tagged as such. But I also expressed enthusiasm for AI’s capacity to help us better understand historic works of art. I cited a (then) recent success related to the Italian Renaissance master Raphael (1483–1520). That discovery had rolled out in the ideal manner: some humans got a hunch first, and then AI proved them right.

Two years later, this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur contains not one, but two, exciting articles showing how AI can benefit our field, and especially collectors. In their article titled “Can AI Build the Art Market’s Trust Infrastructure?” Thereza Wells and Nicholas Eastaugh argue that AI “offers an opportunity to strengthen the market’s underlying infrastructure by making information more transparent, trust more measurable, risk more manageable, and decisions more informed. Far from replacing scholarship or connoisseurship, AI has the potential to reinforce both.” All good so far.

Then, in “The Third Revolution: How AI Is Changing Collecting,” Gregory J. Peterson traces his own experiences using AI to learn more widely and deeply about artworks and artists, even those in his own outstanding collection of contemporary art. Peterson says he has already benefited from two revolutions in the gathering of art-related information and imagery — the blossoming of art fairs and the emergence of the internet. Now, he declares, AI “is the third —and perhaps the most profound.”

I encourage you to closely read both articles, which are full of insights useful to everyone in our field. I am grateful to these authors, and I generally share their optimism about AI. However, having just read a newspaper article about teenage suicides triggered by misinformation, I also remain concerned about AI’s capacity to charm or deceive users who do not have the time or experience to “fact check” what it tells them. The authors of our two articles know how to sniff out nonsense, or to contextualize AI’s findings with further prompts. Good for them, but most of us are often rushing toward deadlines, willing to grab information and act upon it. As they say, just because we can does not mean we should, so let’s proceed with both caution and enthusiasm.

Clearly, AI is a game-changer, but we must ensure it does not up-end the norms that keep the making, collecting, and admiring of art the gratifyingly authentic experiences they have (generally) been thus far.

What are your thoughts? Share your letter to the Editor below in the comments.

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Story prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Fine Art Today