Ai art

Jeanne grabbed a pen with her smaller, more dexterous right hand, and stared at the paper laying in front of her.
"... I can do this."
She slapped her bulkier left hand on the sheet to hold it still, and she put the tip of the pencil to it.
And then she stopped moving.
The only indication she didn't shut down or crash was the quiet Humm of her coolant pumps, radiator fans, and the occasional whirr of her eyes shifting between the paper and the mirror in front of her.

Then slowly, her hand moved. It was a hesitant process, with her stopping every few centimeters, and lifting the pen at seemingly random intervals to restart a line elsewhere.

But progressively, the lines started to intersect, to join each other, forming recognizable shapes.

This kept going for a while, and she pointedly ignored her internal clock, knowing she was taking an agonizingly long time for this.

She only stopped when she reached a point where she didn't know what to add. So she put down the pencil, and stood too look at her drawing.

It was a self-portrait, flipped so her asymmetry was on the correct side.
Even to her it looked strange, compared to what she saw humans do, or dedicated softwares.
Some areas had too much details, when others had practically none.

She stared at the image, thinking of how drawing what you saw was more complex than expected.


"Jeanne?"
Startled, she swung around, the only thing keeping the reflex from being aggressive being the use of her name.

It was Gladys, who crouched down to be on her level. Her optic subasemblies twitched in their mounts, half of them focusing on the piece of paper, the rest on Jeanne's face.

"did you make this?"
her white, segmented digits reached for the drawing, silently asking for her permission.

"yes."
Jeanne grabbed it with her mismatched hands and handed it to her.

Gladys simply took it and held it a little to the side of her face, one eye focusing on it, the other on Jeanne.
"this is... You?"

Jeanne nodded.

The two machines stared at each other.

"was it... Hard ?"

Jeanne nodded again.

Gladys gave her the paper back.

"you didn't use any special programs?"

Jeanne looked down at her hands.

"just me. It's weird. I don't understand how this works. It's hard."

Gladys looked at herself in the mirror.

"how did you know which parts to draw?"

"I drew with what I use to recognize things." she started moving her hand in the air, tracing shapes only she could see with her fingers.

They stayed like this for a moment, Gladys tracking the movements and Jeanne gesturing at nothing.

Then Jeanne turned to Gladys.
"did you try drawing?"

"no. I never thought about it, I have modeling softwares, and I have a more advanced vision system than yours so I can just scan things." she look up at the ceiling, counting the specs of dust. "I can run a stable diffusion process, but I don't think that's the same thing."

She looked down at Jeanne, who was holding the pen toward her.

"do you want to try?"

Gladys took it, and stared at her hand.

"... Yes."


And so, the two robots spent the rest of the day attempting to figure out how to draw physically, selecting what is worth putting detail into, and how to adapt their perception on a flat surface.