{"id":699614,"date":"2026-06-12T11:35:31","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T11:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/699614\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T11:35:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T11:35:31","slug":"chatbot-turns-100-thrift-store-find-into-254k-windfall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/699614\/","title":{"rendered":"Chatbot Turns $100 Thrift- Store Find Into $254K Windfall"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n A hunch and an AI chatbot just turned a thrift-store score into a quarter-million-dollar windfall. In 1966, art lover Helene Plotkin, who the Edinburgh Reporter<\/a> notes was pregnant at the time with her first child and looking to decorate her apartment, paid less than $100 for a colorful portrait she found in a shop in White Plains, New York. “My background in art history and studio practice drew me to this piece instantly,” she now tells the BBC<\/a>. Plotkin hung the piece on her wall for decades, never suspecting it was anything more than a piece she liked, per the New York Times<\/a>. That changed when her son Barry recently snapped a photo, uploaded it to Google’s Gemini, and asked what it was looking at. \n <\/p>\n


\n The chatbot flagged the work as a 1920s studio portrait by Scottish Colorist FCB Cadell, even identifying the style, studio, and model, then urged the family to seek out experts and provided names. Auction house Lyon & Turnbull<\/a> confirmed the painting’s origins\u2014though it corrected the model’s identity\u2014and sold “Interior: The Lady in Black” this month for about $254,000 to a private buyer. Plotkin, now 88 and living in Florida, says the proceeds will go to her sons; her main wish is that the painting occasionally be shown in public so her grandchildren might one day spot “Nana’s painting” on a museum wall. The development underscores how AI image tools could expand access to the kind of object identification typically reserved for specialists. \n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A hunch and an AI chatbot just turned a thrift-store score into a quarter-million-dollar windfall. In 1966,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,1029,181,507,8532,11893,3110,1033,39598,74],"class_list":["post-699614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-art","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-auction","tag-chatbot","tag-google-gemini","tag-painting","tag-paintings","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}