AI Forgers Are Now Targeting Art Documents—Here’s What It Means for Digital Provenance

Forgery just got a tech upgrade. Fraudsters are weaponizing artificial intelligence to create fake art documents—certificates of authenticity, provenance records, and ownership histories—undermining the very foundations of art valuation and trust.

How the Scam Works

AI tools—once the domain of digital artists and content creators—are now being repurposed to generate convincing forgeries. The systems analyze thousands of genuine documents to mimic fonts, official seals, curator signatures, and even the degraded paper quality of historical records. The result? A counterfeit paper trail that can slip past galleries, auction houses, and unsuspecting collectors.

The Digital Trust Gap Widens

This isn't just about fake paintings. It's about eroding the chain of custody in an industry built on pedigree. When a PDF or scanned document can be AI-generated, the traditional 'paper-based' proof becomes worthless. Experts warn that the art market's slow adoption of blockchain or other immutable ledgers leaves a gaping vulnerability—one that fraudsters are now exploiting with algorithmic precision.

A Cynical Nod to Finance

Ironically, the very institutions that dismiss cryptocurrency as a 'speculative bubble' are now facing a crisis of verification in their own backyard. While they debate digital asset volatility, their own antiquated systems are being hacked by AI—proving that sometimes the real risk isn't a new technology, but an old one that failed to evolve.

What Comes Next?

The art world now faces a stark choice: cling to paper and trust, or embrace the digital verification tools it has long resisted. Because in the age of AI, the most valuable skill won't be spotting a brushstroke—it'll be spotting a algorithm's flaw.

Exposing how fraudsters build convincing paperwork

Olivia Eccleston, a fine art insurance broker at Marsh, said chatbots and large language models are now helping fraudsters forge sales invoices, valuations, provenance documents, and certificates of authenticity.

Olivia said this adds a new LAYER to an old fraud problem in the art market. Some attempts are deliberate. Others start when someone asks an AI model to search historic databases, and it produces results that never existed. Those errors then show up in paperwork that gets sent to insurers as if it were fact.

The chain of ownership, known as provenance, is central in the art world. When people corrupt that chain with invented details, the artwork’s value collapses.

Angelina Giovani, co-founder of provenance research group Flynn & Giovani, said AI makes this easy because “it’s quite conniving… it has to come up with an answer, so if you give it enough information, it will guess something.” Angelina said she saw a case where an AI system appeared to create a signature on a painting to strengthen its story.

Experts note that none of this is new in principle. People once copied letterheads from respected institutions or designed fake stamps.

Now they lean on AI to generate the same paperwork with smoother language and fewer obvious errors. Filippo Guerrini-Maraldi, head of fine art at insurer Howden, said he has seen many forged documents over his career and that automated systems now make them look more realistic.

Angelina said she has seen fake ledger numbers and forged Nazi-era stamps on provenance files. She also pointed to the case of Wolfgang Beltracchi, who created hundreds of paintings and used staged photographs to build fake ownership histories behind them. These tactics show how far people go to support artwork that cannot stand on its own.

Tracking digital clues as fraud becomes harder to see

Harry Smith, executive chair of art valuers Gurr Johns, said AI now makes fraud quicker because people no longer need to invent a fake expert to back their claim. The tool produces whatever support text they want.

Grace Best-Devereux, a fine art loss adjuster at Sedgwick, said she checks metadata in digital documents to spot signs of AI interference. Grace said adjusters also use their own systems to decide whether a provenance document is real.

But she warned that the job is getting harder because new tools are making forged text look normal. Grace said, “We’re at this precipice where it might not be possible for me to look at it and say, ‘the text looks wrong, and I need to investigate this further.’”

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