Fake Monet, Renoir paintings identified using AI

ZURICH

An artwork authentication expert recently said she identified 40 supposedly fake painting being offered for sale on eBay, including two attributed to Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, ARTnews has reported.

Carina Popovici, CEO and co-founder of the Swiss firm Art Recognition, told The Guardian earlier this week that she applied “cutting edge artificial intelligence [AI]” technology to photos on the e-commerce platform and found “up to 40” paintings had a high probability of not being authentic.

“The algorithm identified all of them as fakes,” she told The Guardian. “We looked today and we downloaded some images, and there were fakes all over the place. Everything that we have analyzed turns out to be not real art, a negative probability with 95 percent or so. I’m sure that this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

According to The Guardian, the images identified as fakes by Popovici’s AI tests included one listed as a work by Monet titled “Forest With a Stream” priced at $599,000. Another item described as a study by Renoir was priced at $165,000.

eBay’s website states “Counterfeit products are illegal and not allowed” and “We don’t allow counterfeit items or unauthorized copies to be listed.”

eBay said it was committed to ensuring items sold on its platform were authentic and noted at least one flagged item had already been removed.

“We do this by using multiple layers of AI technology, professionally trained eBay investigators and buyer protection programs. eBay proactively blocked 88 million suspected counterfeits from being published in 2022, while removing 1.3 million items from the platform following a review by an eBay investigator.”