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
How is AI our friend when it steals our original creations, without attribution or payment? (speaking as an artist of 40+ years).
And for just one example, offers to generate pet/owner portraits in the style of old masters, SUPER CHEAPLY and quick? What more is to come? Why commission a living artist?
Even my little techie brother suggested that he wanted to use AI to generate Karen Horne – ish paintings of scenes he had in mind. Oblivious to the damage to me and my business. Sad.
Also, a lifetime of expertise in art and art history is no longer as valuable, when online attributions are made easy and routine for anyone.
Oof, this is a painful take. Especially for a fine art site.
– It often gives incorrect (and as you mentioned, sometimes dangerous) information that isn’t trustworthy enough to cite anywhere,
– It steals work from actual human living artists and strips it of all personality and soul,
– If the best argument for it is to discover artists whose art is available for collecting, it’s hard not to point out that there are websites, apps, institutions, books, magazines (*cough cough*), and basic search engines who all offer the exact same thing without the extensive environmental footprint and IP theft.
Isn’t art’s whole purpose to make us feel something? And what does that say about us if we would rather farm out that one thrilling emotion to a computer?
Does anyone feel that AI generated art will actually drive up the cost of human art? Particularly originals?
I think it should be legally required that AI art must have AI plainly in front of the artist signature. It should also be the same for mass produced art!
We now have artificial food! I don’t see how it can be stopped. It should make Original human hand painted art much more valuable and appealing.
I would only use AI for a first draft of collating and sorting large amounts of data, (of the mindless clicking and putting into boxes type) but little else. Otherwise, the damage to your brain is very real, and we are selling what makes us human for convenience, putting a lot of real humans out of work for a flawed result, (but fast!) at the cost of our working memory and cognitive functioning, especially amongst children. AI is a liar and a thief, and should be treated accordingly. Anything you get from it should be treated as suspect and triple checked, because it is trained to give you whatever it thinks you want, truth be damned.
As for artists, I have watched several artists and galleries I admire embrace AI, and it shows in their work, glaringly. It smacks of slop, and I mourn the artist’s actual development, sacrificed for convenience. People call it progress, but I wouldn’t. We are literally selling our souls, and in doing so, missing on the struggle and the glory (and the fun?) of the process, and our personal skill development as artists and humans alike. As a final insult, it makes everything look…the same.
I’ve even tried to be a good sport about it, using it in very limited fashion for practical purposes, but the rate at which even my writing is changing cadence from reading AI written copy on the internet all day, is alarming. It is insidious and “inevitable”, but I resist!
The Positive: the rough hewn hand is fashionable again (perhaps a little too rough, for my taste), and skilled human craftsmanship will eventually become more valuable as a result. Unique analogue objects that cannot be duplicated will become the ultimate luxury. So we’re in the right business in the long term, as long as we stick to our guns, and don’t let the robots eat our brains. 🙂