Can You Tell Whether a Robot or an Artist Painted This Portrait?

Robots face some of the same problems in learning to draw as humans do, Tresset says. "When we draw, the difficulty is not in making the lines. The difficulty is in the perception of the subject and the perception of the drawing in progress." But sometimes, it may help to make it seem that the robot has difficulty in making the lines--Tresset has found that people feel more empathy for the machines when they make human-esque mistakes like crooked or tilted lines. Humans are inclined to want to identify with robots, especially those with faces: Give a person a bot, and he or she will probably name it. But why is that connection important in robots that draw?