ART-ificial Intelligence
By Jennifer Lee Rossman
Just outside of the city, where the glass and white plaster gives way to greens and yellows and sunsets on distant horizons, there’s an art factory the rest of humanity pretends to have forgotten.
Dandelions poke through the asphalt of the road leading up to it, nature repairing what we abandoned. I think me and my bike are the only human commuters to come this way in a long time. Decades, maybe.
It’s hidden away behind an overgrown trellis that used to be a chain-link fence. An ordinary, unassuming building—although I’ve never known a building to assume anything so I’m not sure I really understand that phrase. It’s not the kind of architectural marvel you would look at twice, or even one and a half times, if not for the mural.
The entire west-facing wall, conveniently devoid of windows, makes up the canvas for a seascape made of bold shapes and irregular lines. Palm trees frame the rest of the scene, with zigzagging ocean waves and a simple circle representing the sun while a larger-than-life orca leaps out of the water.
It’s beautiful and unnatural, beautiful because it’s unnatural.
Did orcas have such distinct and playful eyes, once upon another time? Was the sun ever so orange, faded now as the mural might be?
Sometimes I come out here just to stare at it, to wonder who did this; the paint has aged too much for it to be a bot. It must be the work of a human.
Did they see into another world and feel the need to document it on the side of a building, or did they just… paint something that wasn’t there?
Since I took the long way home to look at the factory, I have to scramble to get my homework done after dinner. It’s becoming a habit, actually, stressing me out more than it should, but I have a system.
My system consists mostly of panicking, skipping most of the assigned reading with the intention of bullshitting my way through the test tomorrow, and answering math questions based on the vibe of the numbers instead of actually doing the math.
It is… not a great system, to be honest, and I think my dad has started to figure that out. Instead of doing my homework in my room, lately I’ve been ushered into his office every evening so he can supervise while he finishes up his own assignments.
And here I thought one of the perks of being an adult was not having homework anymore. Guess I was wrong. Just like I’m probably wrong about 7×7 being 47. But it sounds good, so that’s what I’m going with.
“Liza,” Dad says suddenly. “You’re between the ages of 13 and 18. Which one of these is more appealing to your demographic?”
I look up from my worksheet, and the number seven I just wrote that curves sort of like a palm tree. Dad is holding two mockups of an ad campaign; both show a handheld computer, the kind with semi-transparent casing available in multiple colors, beneath the words “A universe of possibilities in the palm of your hand.”
“Which font?” I ask, seeing no other difference between the two.
“Yes. Do kids prefer neon or 8-bit?”
I have no idea what other kids like. Not me, I know they don’t like me, but that isn’t helpful right now. “Is there another option? Maybe a kind of… blocky but still glowing?”
With a contemplative “mmm,” he turns back to his desk, inputting the updated prompt into his computer. “And put the device in someone’s hand,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.
While the request is being uploaded and redesigned by the bots at the nearest automated art facility, I go back to my homework. Well, I go back to looking at my homework, anyway. My mind is elsewhere.
“What if the hand was the color of the universe?” I ask, idly making meaningless squiggles with my gel pen in the margins of my paper.
Dad reacts as if I just spoke gibberish. “What?”
“You know. Purples and blacks and blues, swirling stars?”
“Why on Earth would I want to do that?”
I point to the first version of the ad. “ ‘A universe of possibilities in the palm of your hand.’ Why not make that literal?”
“Because it’s ridiculous. Unrealistic.”
Creative, he means. Innovative. Imaginative.
He reaches over to the printer, pulling out the freshly printed sheet of paper with the updated image on it. “Good idea with the font. I like it.”
The rest of the evening is spent in silence, Dad perfecting his ad campaign and me finding some of my squiggles have become orcas leaping through a universe of multiplication tables. When we leave the office, I think I hear something printing, but don’t think anything of it.
When I come downstairs for breakfast, Dad is already at the table, holding a piece of paper so tightly that his fingers are creating creases. Wordlessly, he slides it across the table.
It’s the ad he was working on last night, but the hand holding the device isn’t the photorealistic one the color of my warm tan skin. It’s a silhouette instead, deep violet and navy bursting with nebulas and galaxies and stars that sparkle like the spray of droplets coming off an orca’s dorsal fin.
“I didn’t,” I swear, my eyes wide.
“It’s one thing to have an imagination,” he tells me, the poster child for not-mad-just-disappointed. “You can’t help that. But to indulge it, to soil your brain with nonsense, to waste the resources of the art bots?”
“But it wasn't me,” I insist. “Maybe they overheard us talking about it and—”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Dad says. “The bots are programmed to execute commands and create images based on their coding. They aren’t capable of spontaneously creating this kind of… artwork.”
He says “artwork” like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth, and when he crumples up the paper and throws it in the recycling, I know there’s no point in continuing the argument. His mind is made up, and like most everyone else in the world, he doesn’t have the capability of imagining a scenario where he isn’t correct.
Exactly why humanity decided that being creative was a waste of our potential, I’m not sure. People don’t really talk about it, and if it’s in my history books, well, we’ve already established how little I pay attention in school.
I only know the result of that decision: imagination is frowned upon and the act of creating has been relegated to bots, filling our world with lifelessly accurate images and uninspired design meant to maximize efficiency.
Whatever the reason, though, people made the bots.
That thought, that fury at the illogical logic I’m supposed to swallow unthinkingly, fuels my pedaling as I make my way to the factory after school that evening.
People made them. Any artificial intelligence they possess is modeled after our natural intelligence. Is it so hard to believe we could have accidentally taught them to be more like us than we realized?
I pass a maintenance bot coming the other direction. Just a little guy, kind of turtle shaped with all-terrain wheels and about a dozen tools on extendable arms. I see them out here about once a week.
Not very talkative. Probably not programmed for anything other than fixing other bots, but I make a point of saying hello in case they’re sentient. Today I add a jaunty salute, just ‘cause.
He continues on, unbothered, and I turn to watch him head back to the city.
Huh. It’s never occurred to me before, but it’s kind of strange that humans don’t maintain the art bots. We maintain most other computerized things, why not them?
Unless someone doesn’t want people going in the factory, doesn’t want them realizing that maybe the bots are smarter, more creative than we give them credit for. And maybe we are, too.
The gate opens with a rusty screech of resistance, and I freeze for a moment, like there’s anyone around to hear it and get me in trouble. Closing the gate behind me, I make my way around the perimeter of the windowless factory, to the other walls hidden from view by the tangles of vines.
There are more murals, each faded with age like the orca but bright enough to suggest they must have been incredibly vibrant when they were new.
Multicolored jungle cats, moons and stars with human-like faces, horses soaring through clouds on feathered wings.
Humbled, I touch the sun-warmed plaster, tracing the brushstrokes with my fingers. How could someone just… pull ideas from their mind and turn them into reality?
Could my brain do that, or does it take some special kind of person?
Between the paws of a rainbow tiger, I find a door. It’s unlocked, because I guess I’m the only one who cares about breaking in, and small. I’m shorter than the other girls in my class, and I have to stoop to avoid hitting my head.
Not designed for humans, just maintenance bots.
I prop the door open with a rock and make my way inside. The sunlight can only push back against the darkness so far, and then it’s just me, my light-up sneakers, and the flashlight feature on my handheld computer.
No human employees, no sense in installing lights, I suppose. Besides the door, the only natural illumination comes from tiny cracks in the apparently thin walls in need of repair.
My flashlight beam reveals row after row of bots: machines built for function rather than form, none of the transparent housing or curving designs typical of modern technology. Just bulky hulks of plastic and electronics drawing sightlessly with mechanical arms and feeding the completed requests into a slot on their front panel.
They’re on wheels, I guess to make it easier to move them around for maintenance, but they’re as tall as I am and twice as wide. Bigger than the doorway.
I don’t even know if any of them are properly sentient, but the idea that they were designed to spend their entire existence in this dark building makes me incredibly sad.
I continue on down the line, not sure what I’m looking for. If I’m looking for anything.
But I find it anyway.
The second bot from the end isn’t like the others. The plain white housing on one side comes alive with color, paintings and drawings and doodles layered on top of one another, depicting everything unimaginable.
The next bot over, sitting at the end of the row, has a sheet of paper on the table in front of him—I don’t know why, but it looks like a him—and is effortlessly filling it with photo accurate images of hamburgers and French fries. A menu, maybe.
When it’s complete, he slides the paper into the slot to send it to the person who requested it. And then, instead of going dormant in between projects, he lifts his pen in his mechanical hand, and he begins drawing on his neighbor.
The artist is amazing.
That’s what he is, an artist. The others can put images on paper, flawlessly recreate anything described to them. But he doesn’t just recreate; he creates.
I bring him paper sometimes, after school, let him work on a bigger canvas that isn’t his neighbor. In between the requests he receives from decorators and printers and advertisers like my dad, he fills the pages with fantastical landscapes and characters.
His programmer must have made him differently, turned on—or maybe didn’t turn off—some function in his computerized brain that freed him from the constraints the others are under.
“Show me who made you,” I ask the artist, and because he wasn’t built for verbal input, I put out a request via my dad’s work account. (If he doesn’t want me hacking in, he should pick a password that isn’t my birthday. Just saying.)
I know the artist will receive my request because not every bot has access to the same databases of information. They share the work, some being dedicated to wildlife, others architecture. The request bounces around until it reaches a bot with the capability to fulfill it.
My request is so vague and abstract, the artist is the only one who will accept it. And a few moments later, he does, his pen skimming effortlessly across the page and stopping only to change colors.
His creation, illuminated by my flashlight, is abstract by necessity. He wasn’t built to see or hear or interact with the world in any way other than what he knows from the databases, he doesn’t know who built him or what they looked like.
The portrait is more of a collage. Pieces of other images cut and pasted together, different shades of skin forming a patchwork face with an oversized smile and mismatched eyes with pupils shaped like infinity. Her curls defy gravity, morphing into ocean waves the color of the Milky Way, impossible and fantastic creatures frolicking in the antigravity surf.
So she was an artist, too, an artist facing the annihilation of human creativity. She must’ve made him like this on purpose, like a time capsule to preserve a record of the way the human mind used to work.
Or maybe to show us how it could work again, if we stop fighting it.
In every spare minute I can scrounge from the endless expectations of efficiency and productivity, I practice.
Not on paper, not if I can help it. My art supplies are French fries dipped in ketchup, my finger tracing through the steam on the mirror after a shower. Anywhere I can easily erase.
I try to wrap my mind around the outlandish ideas the artist makes, the way his creator taught him to take reality as merely a suggestion. The ability is in me, squashed down and locked away by society; I just need to find it, nurture it.
It’s not that easy.
How do you make something up out of nothing? Just invent something you’ve never seen and decide what it looks like?
And why do I feel like this impossibility is what I’m supposed to do with my life?
Those questions take over my thoughts, my life. I didn’t think it was possible for my grades to suffer any more, but I find a way. (Look at me, already doing the impossible.)
It’s funny, actually. They said creativity got in the way of everything else, but I can focus when I’m drawing. I can even see the math inherent in the world, in the spiraling ratios of sunflowers and seashells. It gives me something resembling clarity in my mind like I’ve never felt before.
I just… don’t really care about school. Too rigid, too boring. I’d much rather practice my art.
I start with simple things. Things I can look at in my life and put together.
What if a dog wore a hat? What if roses grew underwater?
The best ideas, I find, start with “What if?”
By the time I move on to more outlandish things like what if clouds could smile and what if people had wings, my teacher has called a meeting to discuss her concerns with me and my dad. I know I should pay more attention, but I just had a thought that feels exciting and dangerous all at once.
What if we could see love?
How would I draw a feeling? What colors would I use? Maybe big, swooping lines wrapping around like a hug.
I’m so caught up in the idea, I don’t hear exactly what my teacher is saying. Just the disapproving tone as she holds up the homework I was doing the night all this started, the one with the orca doodled in the margins.
It isn’t until the next day, when I follow fresh tire tracks out to the factory and find an angry group of people, that I fully understand what is going on.
They’ve made the connection to the orca mural, figured out where I learned to think creatively, and they’re going to make sure no one else has the opportunity I had.
I sneak around back, through the door between the tiger paws no one else has seemed to notice. I don’t know exactly what they plan to do, but I need to protect the artist, I need to get him out of here so we can show the world we don’t need to choose between art and productivity.
He’s sitting at the end of the line, as always, his pen substituted for a paintbrush today. Someone must have ordered a specific style of image he can’t replicate with ink.
“How do we get you out of here,” I mumble, more to myself than anything.
Being on wheels, the artist will be easy to move, but there’s nowhere to go. He won’t fit through the door.
I consider logging in to my dad’s account again, requesting the artist draw me an escape plan, but there’s no time. People are talking; the door opens and a rectangle of sunshine appears on the floor.
I slip out of my light-up shoes and turn off my flashlight. I don’t need to see, right? If I can visualize a dog wearing a hat, for sure I can visualize the factory layout.
And I can come up with my own escape plan. I just need to think creatively. It isn’t something I’m great at, not yet, but I’m getting there. I can do this.
Can’t go through the door, and it’s the only one I know of. If there’s a way out through the roof, I wouldn’t be able to get the artist up there.
So that leaves the walls.
They’re thin and old; sunlight shines through tiny cracks all over. More importantly, they’re our only chance. No one is going to stop and let me explain how important the artist, and art itself, is.
I need to show them what creativity can do.
With all of my strength, I push the artist away from his station. The people behind us must hear my grunting but I don’t care. I get a running start, putting all of my weight behind the artist, and we charge towards the wall.
There’s a crash, and the sudden brightness hurts my eyes, but we did it. We broke through the wall, bursting into the sunshine like the orca mural we just ruined, bits of plaster acting as our sparkling water droplets.
While everyone else is still trying to work out what just happened, I grab the paintbrush and paints out of the artist’s mechanical hand and hurry over to the wall.
I don’t think about it, I just paint.
Colors and shapes, ideas and feelings. I’m not even sure what exactly I’m painting, I’m just trusting myself to be creative, and I only stop when a hand—my father’s hand, it turns out—takes me by the shoulder and pulls me away.
He’s about to yell at me, someone else is already yelling about the artist and how to take him apart to protect my generation. And then everyone stops. Just stops, all at once, and looks at my painting.
I look at it, too.
It starts with stick figures. Woolly mammoths and ancient horses. Cave paintings, our first evidence that humans have always felt the need to leave a mark on the world.
Those morph, evolve, into something more colorful. Flowers, brighter than any you’ll see in the real world, growing straight out of somebody’s unique interpretation of the world, the way only they can see it.
And then there’s me. Well, it’s supposed to be me. I'm not good with faces yet. My hair curls up like the artist’s portrait of his creator, but not in gentle waves. It explodes with color, twirling and zigzagging in every direction like my imagination is spiraling out of my brain.
It’s crude, hasty, and I definitely need more practice with faces. But the idea is there, and everyone is looking at it like they suddenly understand something about the world, about themselves.
So maybe that’s all we need to change things sometimes, just an idea.
This story originally appeared in AI, Robot in February 2024.
Jennifer Lee Rossman (they/them) is a queer, disabled, and autistic author and editor from the land of carousels and Rod Serling. Their work has been featured in dozens of anthologies, and they have been nominated for Pushcart and Utopia Awards. Find more of their work on their website, http://jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com. Follow them on Twitter @JenLRossman.