MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. Last week, MIT News announced his solution: a technique that uses AI-generated polymer films to physically restore damaged paintings in hours rather than months. The research appears in Nature.

Kachkine's method works by printing a transparent "mask" containing thousands of precisely color-matched regions that conservators can apply directly to an original artwork. Unlike traditional restoration, which permanently alters the painting, these masks can reportedly be removed whenever needed. So it's a reversible process that does not permanently change a painting.

"Because there's a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they'll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting," Kachkine told MIT News. "And that's never really been possible in conservation before."

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