Prepare for a wave of AI-enabled criminal enterprise

Today's digital criminals can generate fake realities on an industrial scale while truth gets harder to spot

- RAHUL MATTHAN

When Wolfgang Beltracchi was finally apprehended in 2010, he had been fooling the art world for nearly four decades. The secret of his success was not in creating perfect replicas of existing works of art, but in convincing buyers that what they were purchasing was real. Beltracchi was, first and foremost, a storyteller. Even before he painted the first stroke, he concocted elaborate narratives about the work he was about to create. He focused on artists with gaps in their catalogue to ensure that what he sold was all the more plausible and created artificially aged photographs to corroborate their provenance. As a result, he could create (and sell) works of famous artists that he convinced his buyers were real. The La Forêt that he, most famously, sold wasn't a replica of a Max Ernst painting; it was a Max Ernst that Max Ernst had never painted.

Forgery is most effective when not just the artefact but the entire backstory has been carefully constructed to support its authenticity. Beltracchi did this painstakingly, one artwork at a time. Today, criminals can automate this using AI. As a result, it is now possible to spin out thousands of plausible backstories in minutes, creating networks of corroborative 'evidence' that can then be deployed across multiple platforms simultaneously. This new technology that has made it possible to mass produce alternate realities has given birth to new forms of criminal enterprise that are proving to be extraordinarily hard to prevent.

In December 2023, the BBC reported that an online news page called