After you have made money and the dividends are flowing into your account, you might think about diversifying your portfolio into art. For hundreds of years, people have been collecting art and artists need patrons to exist. For every type of artwork, there is somebody who really likes it and wants to own it. Sometimes figuring out who they are is the tough part to selling art, but there is a market. As prices begin to rise for the artwork, there is somebody who wants to copy the style and sell you their art disguised as the original or there is fraud in artwork.

Only after an artist becomes famous and their artwork is catalogued and carefully maintained can a person buy the art without really knowing it is a fake or not. If you think about the great masters, they often had apprentices, did the master do the work or the apprentice, but it was the master’s vision. After learning, did the apprentice copy the master or develop their own style? who knows.

In an article by Tara Deschamps of The Canadian Press, for one artist Norwal Morriseau there is an app for that.

Mr. Morrisseau was an artist for most of his life but became famous late in life. He lived a varied life with and without a great deal of money which meant that people knew and like the style, but few people knew if the paintings were fake or not. In the past years, many collectors have discovered their paintings were fake as more than 6,000 fake paintings were sold at a cost of $100 million. The fraud is known as the biggest art fraud in world history.

In the case of Mr. Morrisseau, an app called Acrylic Robotics founded by Chloe Ryan. The software runs on AWS or Amazon Web Services and logs every movement, detecting millions of details in one piece, including the strokes, brush pressure, pigment and speed.

If anomalies can be detected, then art experts, historians can dig further.

Apparently most art experts who value art are staying away from Mr. Morrisseau’s art because of the great many fakes.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in all businesses, fraud is a concern. It is rallying cry to cut fraud from the public service. What is fraud? AI can help and over the next few months and years, we soon will see the auditors used AI to detect fraud in the books.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.