When human art is mistaken for AI: value shifts from the result to the process and provenance

By Trinidad Guardian · October 24, 2026.

Artist Sarah Belle-Smythe, 41, who lives in Tunapuna (Trinidad and Tobago), tells the Trinidad Guardian that some of her works are being compared to AI-generated art. According to the newspaper, the most recent case is a mural she is painting at El Dorado Secondary East school: people who see it say “it's like AI.”

Belle-Smythe says capturing the detail of a piece takes her hours and sometimes days. With no formal art training, she opened her studio, Bellexpressions Art Studio, in 2005 and today paints landscapes, portraits and, more recently, pet portraits. She says she wants to open her own gallery and shop. Her conviction, in her words to the newspaper, is that “nothing could replace the human touch” and that the public would ultimately prefer work made by a person, because “it is felt, not just seen.”

The material is a profile interview, not a study: it provides no data on the market or on public preferences. What follows is therefore our own reading.

**Our take.** The most revealing part of the story is not her romantic thesis but the detail about the mural: for part of the public, the hallmark of quality in a handmade work is now “it looks like AI.” It is a curious reversal. For centuries, technical virtuosity was proof of human effort; today a flawless finish breeds suspicion. This suggests that the visual result alone is no longer a reliable indicator of authorship.

We believe Belle-Smythe's claim (“anyone would prefer the human one”) is an aspiration, not a proven fact. In general, studies on the perception of synthetic art show that people often cannot tell the difference and that their preference shifts once they know the origin. But that is precisely why her argument carries weight: what is valued is the story, the time and the person behind it, not the pixel. A work with verifiable provenance will be worth more than an identical one without it.

For those who make a living from art, the short term is uncomfortable. Low-cost commissions (generic illustration, decoration, stock images) are the most exposed, because there the buyer is after a result, not a story. The winners are artists with a recognizable identity, a local presence and physical work; a mural in a school, a portrait of a family's pet or a piece you can touch and hang are formats where in-person presence and connection matter. The losers are those who competed only on speed and price.

There is also a practical consequence for the industry: provenance (signature, process records, authenticity marks) will become a product in its own right. Showing the process, as this artist does when she recounts the entire night she spent painting a National Geographic image, is already part of the commercial value.

In the long term, we stand by our underlying thesis: if AI lowers the cost of producing the functional and opens the way to abundance, handmade art does not disappear; rather, it is freed from the obligation to pay its way through utility and becomes what people do because they are passionate about it. That someone can paint for love of the craft, as Belle-Smythe has since childhood, without depending on it to eat, is precisely the kind of society technology should make possible. The transition, however, will be paid for first by the creators with the thinnest margins, and there we should not be naive.