In art, artificial intelligence (AI) is used to detect forgeries and predict trends. But it is also, in a world increasingly assisted by AI, used at all levels of creation. Could this lead to a form of artificial imagination capable of producing something sensitive on its own? By creating machines that create, it’s a question that more and more artists are asking.
For forty years, Wolfgang Beltracchi painted counterfeit works of Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque, Max Ernst... Fake paintings that the worldly bohemian con artist, with the help of his wife Helene, then sold for tens of millions, fooling even the greatest experts. Beltracchi and his wife were finally arrested in 2010 by the German police and later sentenced by the courts in Cologne the following year (they live free and in Switzerland today).