Staring enigmatically at an unseen object to her right, the black-haired woman bears a striking resemblance to the person depicted in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting Gabrielle, which Sotheby's recently valued at between £100,000-150,000. However, art connoisseurs disagree over whether the work, which is owned by a private Swiss collector, is the real deal. Now, artificial intelligence has waded in to help settle the dispute, and the computer has deemed that it probably is a genuine Renoir. AI is increasingly being used to help adjudicate on whether valuable artworks are real or fake. Earlier this month, Art Recognition, the Swiss company that developed the technology, announced it had concluded that Switzerland's only Titian – a work titled Evening Landscape with Couple, held by Kunsthaus Zürich – was probably not painted by the 16th-century Venetian artist.

Popularly, art connoisseurs are portrayed as sophisticados who carry themselves with an aura of mystery, in command of an inner portal to truth that the rest of us inexplicably just don't possess. Presented with an unassuming Renaissance painting purchased for $1,000 in New Orleans, for instance, one might be stricken with certainty that the painting was authored by no other than Leonardo da Vinci; another attributes hundreds of paintings to Rembrandt and claims that his genius is obvious to the "experienced eye." The elusive certainty of connoisseurship has always come with raised eyebrows: can you tell a garage sale replica from the real deal, let alone a workshop painting from an Old Master one? Can we trust anyone who claims to know? Recent developments in machine learning applied to photographs of artwork promise to lend more objectivity to processes of attribution when the provenance is uncertain.