How Canadian-made robots are rooting out fraud

Genevieve Beauchemin has the story of how AI and technology is being used to restore the legacy of Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau.

Robots at a startup in Montreal are helping restore the legacy of world-renowned Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau.

A sprawling investigation into forgeries of Morrisseau’s paintings that have flooded the market for decades has uncovered what investigators have called the biggest case of art fraud in Canada, and some say, possibly in the history of the world.

The estate of the late artist has turned to AI and robots to help authenticate his paintings, in hopes of providing concrete empirical evidence for Canadian courts.

The process involves robotic arms that take paintbrushes, dip them in bright paint colours and execute complex strokes on a canvas to produce copies of paintings. This may evoke fears of robots taking over the art world, but those behind the technology say the paintings are not machine-created fakes to be passed off as a real Morrisseau, but replicas to train AI models to root out fraud.

“The better our work gets, the better the model has to get to detect the copies,” said Acrylic Robotics CEO Chloe Ryan. “This also allows us to refine our robotic techniques.”

Ryan is a former painter now armed with a degree in mechanical engineering, who set out on a mission to shake up the art world when she co-founded Acrylic Robotics.

“I have been painting and selling my work since I was a teenager, and I became very frustrated with how long it would take me to make a painting, and then I could sell that work of art once to one person,” they said. “I was making two dollars an hour, and I thought, ‘how can artists make a living selling their art?’”

Ryan says that led to a longer reflection on what she calls the “scarcity-driven art market.”

“The value of art is driven by how few people have access to it,” she said. “In the music or film industry, it is driven by how many people your art resonates with.”

Ryan set out to pioneer a model that would allow for the creation of copies of paintings that capture the same details as the original. She knows that is a scary proposition to some who are concerned robots could take over the work of human creativity, but she says this is based on using technology as a tool.

The model she is pitching is of artists consenting to copies of their paintings to be made, which would be clearly identified as copies, so that the human behind the art will be credited and compensated while also making their art more accessible.

“I am pioneering a new method of creation in fine art, one that is driven by how many people resonate with your work, and not one that is driven by how scarce it is,” said Ryan.

‘He made Canada look at itself’

But what caught the attention of the estate of the late Morrisseau is the technology’s potential to help in its fight against forgeries. Morrisseau, who died in 2007 at the age of 75, was a world-renowned painter known as the grandfather of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada.

“Morrisseau was pivotal in sharing Indigenous culture, opening up markets and new pathways for other Indigenous artists,” said Cory Dingle, the executive director of Morrisseau’s estate. “But he also made Canada look at itself.

“All through the residential school trauma, the land displacement and all the racism against him, his art always spoke of love and unity,” adds Dingle. “(O)f interconnectivity and interdependency, and so it is important to restore his legacy.”

Morrisseau’s pieces sell in the millions, but thousands of fraudulent works of art have flooded the market since the late 1990’s, making it difficult to authenticate and sell his paintings. The estate says reporting fakes posed a challenge in the face of Canadian laws.

Acrylic Robotics works closely with the estate to create increasingly precise copies of Morrisseau paintings, which are used to train a computer program called Norval AI that was developed three years ago by professors to detect fakes.

That program produces heat maps showing spots where a copy differs from the original. Acryclic Robotics has been going back and forth with the estate for about a year, improving copy after copy.

For Morrisseau’s estate, this is part of a crucial mission.

“Restoring his legacy means that these institutions will study him, that the museum will display him, and we will be able to share this with the world,” said Dingle, sitting in front of a rarely seen Morrisseau.

But in the process, there will be more Morrisseau copies floating around. Robotic Acrylics says it is working with the estate to ensure that there are markings in the pieces to ensure that they could never be sold as originals.

Producing precise brush strokes involves much more than a few clicks of a mouse.

“There is a robotic challenge of how do I have a robot move in the same way as a human wrist, with the same delicate strokes,” said Ryan.

Achieving that may spark concerns about machines replacing humans, but the hope here is that this is a high-tech step in the age-old fight against art fraud.