Journal

Was this made by a person? What you can and cannot check before buying art online

Published 1 October 2026 · Buying & collecting

The old question was whether a painting was really by the artist whose name was on it. The question people ask now, buying online, is whether a person made it at all. A listing says hand painted and the canvas arrives as a print of a generated image. A photograph turns out never to have had a camera behind it.

The short answer is that you usually cannot tell from the picture. You can tell a great deal from the seller, from the file, and from the record behind the work. This is what is worth checking, and what each answer actually means.

Why looking closely does not settle it

Generated images used to give themselves away with extra fingers and lettering that dissolved into nonsense. Far fewer do now, and once a generated image has been printed on good paper it looks like any other print. Zooming in on a listing photo is not evidence either way.

Detector apps do not settle it either. They return a probability, not an answer. Different tools often disagree about the same image, and a crop, a resize or a print and rescan can change the verdict. They also get it wrong in the other direction, and an artist wrongly told their own work is machine made has been harmed too. Treat a detector result as a reason to ask questions, never as the answer to them.

Content Credentials, and what they can and cannot tell you

Content Credentials are a signed record written into an image file by the camera or software that produced it, following an open standard called C2PA. Some cameras sign a photograph at the moment it is taken. Some image generators, Adobe Firefly and OpenAI’s image tools among them, write a record into the file stating that it was made with AI.

When a record is present and its signature checks out, it is strong evidence of where that file came from. If the record says the image was AI generated, that is the maker’s own software saying so.

Three limits matter just as much:

• No credentials proves nothing. Most phones and scanners do not write them, and screenshots, most editing and many websites strip them out. A file without them is the normal case, not a warning sign.
• A signature can be valid without being trusted. Anyone can sign a file. What counts is whether the signer is on the public list of recognised signers, so a record that verifies but names an unknown signer says less than it appears to.
• They describe a file, not an object. For a painting, the most they can tell you about is the photograph of the painting.

On Veriroo, every original uploaded is read for Content Credentials. Where a record is present, the piece shows a short line saying what signed it and whether the signature verified, and it says plainly when the file declares AI generated content. Where there is none, nothing is shown, because absence is not a signal. A certificate only mentions Content Credentials when the signature verifies and the signer is on the public trust list. We do not add our own signature to files, and we do not run AI detection. There is more on this in how art authentication works.

What to ask the seller

The most useful evidence comes from the person selling, and it costs nothing to ask for.

• Can I see it being made? Photographs of the work at different stages, a sketch, the canvas half finished on the easel. A dated trail like that is hard to produce after the fact, which is exactly why it is worth having.
• What tools did you use, and what was your part? Plenty of artists work with AI openly, and that is a legitimate way to make work. The issue is disclosure. An artist who uses it will tell you which tool and what they did themselves. Vagueness is the thing to notice.
• For a print, what was the original? A painting that was photographed, a photograph from a named camera, a digital drawing made by hand, or a generated image. Each is a fair thing to sell. They are not the same thing to buy.
• Will you put that in writing? On the listing, the receipt or the certificate. A description in writing is what you can rely on later.

What the description is worth

In the UK, goods bought from a business must match the description they were sold under. If a piece is sold as an original painting and turns out to be a print of a generated image, that is a problem with the description that you can raise with the seller, not simply a disappointment. A private seller is also held to what they said, though putting it right is usually harder. Either way, the description you were given in writing is the thing you will be pointing to. This is general information, not legal advice.

What a certificate does and does not tell you

A certificate of authenticity records who stated what. When an artist issues one on their own work, it is the artist’s statement about a piece they made. That is meaningful, and it is not an independent examination. Who can issue a certificate, and when sets out the difference on Veriroo.

An independent expert verification is a qualified person examining the work and recording a conclusion, whatever it turns out to be. If how a piece was made matters to you, ask which kind of document you are looking at. Getting a piece verified explains how that works here.

How we handle it

Veriroo does not ban AI art and does not try to detect it. What matters to us is that work is described as what it is. When an artist tells Verity, our assistant, that a piece is AI generated art, she asks which tool they used and what the prompt or creative direction was, and invites them to say what their own role was and which model version they used. Those answers are recorded on the piece. It is a declaration, not a detection, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.

For work made by hand, the strongest evidence is the trail of its making. An artist can add dated work in progress photographs to a piece as they go and make them public, and public entries show on the piece’s verify page for any buyer to see. Stories, notes and forensic evidence covers what to record.

None of this requires buying through us. The questions above are worth asking anywhere, and the answers tell you as much about the seller as about the work.