Artificial intelligence has to date been enlisted as a bogeyman in cultural circles: Software will take the jobs of writers and translators, and AI-generated images ring the death toll for illustrators and graphic designers. Yet there's a corner of high culture where AI is taking on a starring role as hero, not displacing the traditional protagonists--art experts and conservators--but adding a powerful, compelling weapon to their arsenal when it comes to fighting forgeries and misattributions. AI is already exceptionally good at recognizing and authenticating an artist's work, based on the analysis of a digital image of a painting alone. AI's objective analysis has thrown a wrench into this traditional hierarchy. If an algorithm can determine the authorship of an artwork with statistical probability, where does that leave the old-guard art historians whose reputations have been built on their subjective expertise?

Advances in imaging technology and especially CV and AI have, for decades, benefited nearly every scientific and engineering discipline, including medicine, geology, biology, chemistry, and psychology. Consider that works of art bear the most memorable and important images ever created by humans, and many works themselves are exceedingly valuable--not just financially but culturally. It is natural, then, that computer methods, properly guided by scholars' knowledge of history and context, should be of service in the humanistic studies of art as well. In fact, in the past few years, rigorous automated image analysis has assisted some art historians, critics, and connoisseurs in their scholarly studies of fine-art paintings and drawings. Such rigorous computer image analysis of fine art is rather different from traditional "digital humanities," which has generally concentrated on digital methods of capture and display but where the fundamental analyses and interpretations are still performed by human scholars and connoisseurs.38

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.

A team of scientists and art historians at Case Western Reserve University say they have used tools of artificial intelligence (AI) to distinguish the individual brushstrokes of one painter from another. The technique could become a valuable tool to help authorities better identify forgeries of work by famous artists; it could also help art historians tell whether a master, or a student, contributed to a given masterpiece. The researchers said they believe the finding is among first of its kind because of how the researchers used the computer to read and learn from the 3D topography of a painting. Other forms of AI-enhanced analysis rely on visible stylistic differences that a program may detect in historic works, they said. The technology of 3D topography describes a three-dimensional relief map of a surface which reveals any differences in "elevation."

Scentmatic, a Tokyo-based company delivering experiences that fully replicate scents and smells, in cooperation with Biotope Co. Ltd., plans to introduce its trademark Kaorium system to a limited number of Nose Shop's branches, a growing curator of perfumes and beauty products, nationwide in Japan. Using AI to describe perfumes in the most artificially intelligent way possible. Scentmatic is a company that aims to use the power of artificial intelligence for scent-related products and services. No, they don't exactly sell colognes and perfumes using finely-calculated smart algorithms. Instead, the AI is used to "translate" these scents into words (relevant text), providing verbal profiles for each related product with the highest descriptive accuracy possible for the language chosen.

As a high school student in a Detroit suburb in the 1990s, Russ Tedrake did not fit the standard profile of a future computer science professor. Although he had a talent for math -- "I won some of the little math competitions," he says -- he spent his spare time playing football or soccer with friends rather than hacking code or even playing video games; in fact, he didn't get his first computer until he was a senior. He got good grades, but he didn't find the work very demanding. The only calculus class offered at his school was geared to the easier of the two Advanced Placement tests offered by the College Board -- although, against the advice of his teachers, Tedrake took the harder test anyway and did well on it. "I just sort of coasted through," he says.