ChatGPT invents fake artworks by Ai Weiwei, Cattelan, and others

ChatGPT, the AI chatbot released by OpenAI in late 2022, has been generating detailed descriptions of nonexistent contemporary artworks, attributing them to real artists such as Ai Weiwei, Maurizio Cattelan, Francis Alÿs, and others. The article by Valentina Tanni on Artribune documents these 'hallucinations'—a technical term for when AI fabricates information—and pairs them with images created by Midjourney. Among the invented works are Ai Weiwei's 'The Death of Socrates,' a site-specific installation supposedly at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and Cattelan's 'The Puppet Master,' a wooden marionette sculpture from 1998. The article highlights the broader context of the AI boom, noting that while tools like Dall-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have made AI accessible to millions, they also raise ethical and legal issues around copyright. Gary Marcus, an AI expert, describes GPT-3 as 'the king of pastiche'—a brilliant imitator that doesn't understand what it says. The experiment underscores the unreliability of AI as a source of factual information, as the chatbot confidently produces convincing but entirely fictional art historical data.