prompt: normal, title: magnet and steal in misc. flash fiction

Joan Henry was a stylus-driving lass, every day still-driven to creating her art. It wasn’t so much she did it for passion, though drawing certainly was her passion, the issue was she’d literally and metaphorically painted herself into a corner. Joan had worked so hard so much of her still-young life getting great at it, been so focused on becoming the finest artist she could, it left her with no marketable skills beyond that. The specific sort of focuses she needed for art wasn’t amenable to flipping burgers or driving cabs. The split-attentions required to fulfill assignments but also hear the muse don’t work on monotonous dayjobs. It was far from ideal and far from normal, but she was wise enough to know ideals and norms are both Entirely Imaginary.

Joan Henry, however, lived in a world, an America that did not appreciate the fine arts at all and only appreciated even the popular arts in the most surface consumeristic manner. ‘Quantity Over Quality’ may as well be on our coins instead of ‘In God We Trust’, for however much longer we mint them. So, no other skills and no other options, she took commissions on the seedier side of the internet, Tumblr, DeviantArt, whatever and made a solid living at it. Nothing rated-R or that sort of thing, but short of that, some quite strange stuff. Marge Simpson’s azure hairy armpits or Sonic the Hedgehog making out with Tony the Tiger. Andrew Cuomo magically morphed into a sexy college-age pizza-delivery girl, not ideal, certainly not normal, but it paid the student loans.

But drive and effort, and even the radical compromise of drawing April O’Neil’s feet for money, are rarely ever enough, unless you’re born-rich to begin with, which Joan surely was not. The AI machines rose to replace even that questionably-salacious breads-and-butter, ‘breasts-and-butter’ as Joan sometimes bitterly portrayed it. Soon, all that a garden-variety pervert needed was an AI link and an ability to spell ‘Care Bears’ and ‘Bondage Gear’ for those Russian servers to spit out hastily-assembled ersatz smut, no payment to any trained human being required.

For the onanistic drive of the internet rabble, 64% of the concept was good enough, six fingers, three elbows and all, they really only needed the drawings for three minutes anyway, of course. As really, that’s all crude AI “art” is, the random mash-up of stolen ideas thrown together into a malfunctioning blender, nothing like intelligence, barely even deserving of the title “artificial”.

But what to do when it’s all you know how to do? All Joan could do was get even better, hoping some still prefer to spend on excellence, instead of taking what procedurally-generation-ed trash they’re handed for free. Some say, if the wind is just right, you can still hear her drawing Conan O’Brien in a diaper. As it should be. Because while cheap tech-fads come and go, art… even the very-most deviant art will live on forever. Not ideal, certainly not normal but, yes, fully human.