While I hesitate to amplify, I find it harder to sit idly in the face of another article touting artificial intelligence as a panacea to art valuation. Moreover, this salacious column is predictably written by someone (Daniel Grant) with no firsthand experience buying, selling, or appraising art, and it is perhaps unsurprisingly riddled with misinformation, inaccuracies, and elisions.

As a small selection:

1. Any responsible mention of the use of AI to authenticate Old Masters should be accompanied by an acknowledgment of its severe limitations and its potential for misattributions and dispute (lest we forget the Raphael episode).

2. Appraisers do not "set prices" -- we set ascribe values. If Mr. Grant does not know the difference, he should not be writing such an article.

3. The statement that "only a small percentage of artworks are sold at public auction" is misleading. A very significant percentage of high-value works of art are sold at auction.

4. Mr. Grant asks how insurers are "supposed to write fine art policies for collections if the appraisers they rely on have little or no access to the prices paid for artworks." It's patently absurd to contend that appraisers have "little or no access" to private realized price data, when in fact it's precisely our job to research and report on such markets. All good appraisers do this -- and insurers know (or should know) to rely on valuations performed by those appraisers. Technology will not help with this.

5. Mr. Grant uncritically quotes an AI professional who says that "A.I. can understand why and when the value of an artist's work changes over time" However, Mr. Grant curiously does not quote a single appraiser. As a reminder, AI is only as good as what it is fed. AI has neither relationships nor private knowledge, nor any real intelligence in making the necessary decisions to such a pursuit as art appraisal.

etc., etc., etc.

Today I discovered that Wikipedia does not have a page on “art appraisal.” They do have one on "art valuation,” though its contents, perhaps not surprisingly, are stilted.

In the first paragraph, its author-less voice proclaims that art valuation “is more of a financial rather than an aesthetic concern” — as if our financial valuations of art are not defined by well-honed “aesthetic concern,” usually over decades. The reader is then informed that our “subjective views” play a part as well, when in fact we are compelled by USPAP to perform our valuations in an independent, impartial, and objective manner. [NB: Opinions of value may vary (even significantly) even among seasoned appraisers, but any USPAP-compliant appraiser is bound to perform valuation services in this manner.]

Also worth adding, there is no Wikipedia page on the Appraisers Association of America, the premier association of personal property appraisers who focus on fine and decorative arts. There are two other major associations of appraisers, namely the International Association of Appraisers (ISA), which is also not represented on Wikipedia, and the American Society of Appraisers, which is represented by a brief Wikipedia page with no mention of art appraisal.

Why should we care? We all know that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, and we yet we all use it to some varying degree for expediency, trying to block out how fundamentally flawed it is. Misrepresentations and omissions of content are already a problem when it comes to personal consumption of information, but the problem is now compounded in the age of AI, which scrapes from all corners of the Internet, including Wikipedia.

What if you asked your AI tool how art is valued? What if it scraped that page, and then you used it in a professional capacity? What if you asked it who the people are who make their living by valuing art?

There are clearly vastly larger problems on Wikipedia with regard to bias, misrepresentation, and exclusion, but this is my corner of the world, so it is my example to highlight with respect to the potential for promulgation of misinformation. Yes, we should edit Wikipedia to rectify this tiny injustice, but the larger principle will remain that today, with AI scraping Wikipedia, it is nothing short of an echo chamber of unattributed statements, many of which are plainly wrong.