Thing of Beauty (short story)

One morning, a group of men in tight purple clothing make a delivery to the house of Gordon Fish in Southern California. It is a machine, the controls of which are labeled in an unknown language. By trial and error, Fish discovers that the machine produces high-quality drawings of people and things. Fish enters one of the drawings in an artistic competition, claiming that it was drawn by a nephew. It wins, but to receive the full prize money, the artist is required to paint the image on a wall. Fish convinces a friend to carry out the task. Fish continues to try to find ways to make money from the machine; he poses as an art teacher and takes on a young woman as a student. As time goes on, he notices that the variety of the images being produced by the machine becomes smaller and smaller. An operating manual came with the machine; he sends it to be translated, and learns that the language is Swedish. He discovers that he has systematically (but inadvertently) been removing images from storage in the machine each time he produces a picture.

Knight's short story anticipated, by roughly 64 years, an actual event. In the 2022 Colorado State Fair, an image created with the artificial intelligence program Midjourney won a blue ribbon. As in the Knight story, the judges did not realize that the image was created by machine.[2]

• Thing of Beauty title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• "Thing of Beauty" at the Internet Archive