As entertaining as it is to watch Nonoti at work, the presence of a machine that does what sketch artists train for years to do is occasionally met with a degree of alarm by some people.

A video posted May 5 of a robot drawing 44 perfect small circles in purple ink before fluffing the 45th and wildly scratching out the whole picture got 3.8 million views. @robotsdraw practically ...

The robot was named Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1, or DOUG 1. The goal was mimicry: As the artist drew, the arm copied. Except it didn’t work out that way.

It operates out of a former aircraft hangar in northern Massachusetts, where its vast computer-controlled machines focus 100,000 watts of invisible laser light onto a bed of powdered metal.