When I was a kid, I had to do a self-portrait in the third grade. It wasn’t a pretty good likeness of me. If I wanted to do a self-portrait now, I’m certain it would be as good.

Perhaps this is why Jen Hui Liao invented a self-portrait machine. This device is designed to take a snapshot of the user, and then it will draw a picture of you.

You might wonder how this works. I’m not certain either, but if you thought that this device comes with some robot arm to draw for you, you’re half right. There is a robot arm, but the user actually handcuffs his or her wrist to it. You might want to check out the YouTube video after the jump to see it in action.

From there, the user just sits and watches as his or her likeness as it is made on paper. My source is somewhat negative on this device, saying that it is a robot who is making us to the work. I suppose this is bringing about our dystopian visions of a machine-dominated future, but let me put a positive spin on this.

I don’t know how to draw myself, much less anything else. If I could have a machine do it for me, I suppose that works. After all, we have machines do a lot of hard work for us these days.

So, why not have a machine do it for us? I suppose that passing a machine’s work off as ours, calling it a self-portrait, is nigh cheating. I wonder if I’m the first tech blogger to bring that up.

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