His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny. 

“ Bob Simon: What do you think this Max Ernst would be worth? Wolfgang Beltracchi: This one? Simon: Yeah. Beltracchi: $5 million, I think. Simon: $5 million.  And you can do it in three days? Beltracchi: Yeah, oh yes, yes, sure, or quicker” -From a 60 minutes interview with Bob Simon

In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.

“Beltracchi estimates he has done 25 Max Ernsts. He is not copying an existing work. He’s painting something he thinks Ernst might have done if he’d had the time or felt like it.”  -  The Con Artist: A multi-million dollar art scam

His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.

Keating painted more than 2,000 forgeries by over 100 different artists in his sixty-six years. Many had fraudulently sold at auctions with the total profits estimated at over 10 million dollars. “I flooded the market with the work of Palmer and many others,” the artist said. “Not for gain (I hope I am no materialist) but simply as a protest against the merchants who make capital out of those I am proud to call my brother artists, both living and dead. It seemed disgraceful to me how many of them had died in poverty,” he defended in The Fake’s Progress, his autobiography. “All their lives they had been exploited by unscrupulous dealers and then, as if to dishonor their memory, these same dealers continued to exploit them in death.” […] Keating had a great respect and understanding of all the artists he imitated but was always reckless in his handling of the materials. He often used house paint and poster paint to mix in with his acrylics as a cheaper way to achieve the impasto works. At times he wouldn’t bother preparing his antique canvases he found at the junk shops out of laziness, so that in just a few years the paint would peel right off to reveal what was originally underneath. Keating often planted what he called “time bombs” like this in his paintings. Because of his understanding of the chemicals used in art restoration, Keating would purposely paint with layers of glycerin, which would destroy the painting once it was cleaned by a restorer, proving it was a fake. He often wrote obscenities under his paintings, like “Bollocks!”, in lead white so that it could be seen by the experts who x-rayed the painting to check its authenticity.

There has not been a single forward movement in our Emancipation or Civil Rights that didn't face extreme violence and require organization and the threat of violence to fight against.

GENERATIVE AI IS NOT CAPABLE OF THINKING OR PANICKING.

This chatbot received negative feedback after it wrongly predicted, based on its training data, the correct action to take.

It did what chatbots do when they get negative feedback, which is to generate a response (derived from lots of real human apologies) that will satisfy the user.

There are semantics involved in how we use the word "think." We say computers are "thinking" all the time when no computer has ever had a "thought" in any way that resembles a human mind—a thing that remains more or less of a black box, philosophically, that we can affect and observe but whose fundamental workings are deeply unknown.

But there are no semantics involved in "panic." "Panic" is an emotional state. The AI didn't "panic," it followed the same decision-making process it always uses and got the answer wrong. It wasn't stressed out. It wasn't surprised. That's all absurd.

It's lying—with the sole caveat that it isn't even capable of knowing that it's lying, because it is just a fancy, fancy chatbot.

But the people building and selling them and convincing people to entrust them with the power to destroy huge amounts of real human work?