Can Computers Create Art?
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
5:30 p.m. - Registration and reception
6:00 p.m. - Lecture begins
Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus
108 College Street, Toronto, ON, M5G 1L6
Join community members to hear from Aaron Hertzmann, principal scientist at Adobe Research and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, discuss the intersection of art and computer science as part of the C.C. “Kelly” Gotlieb Distinguished Lecture Series.
In his talk, Hertzmann will delve into the evolving role of AI in art, exploring how new neural network algorithms are transforming artistic creation and their parallels with historical artistic technologies. Discover why AI algorithms, despite their impact, are unlikely to be considered true artists, and how they will reshape our understanding of art.
Abstract:
Can AI algorithms make art, and be considered artists? Within the past decade, the growth of new neural network algorithms has enabled exciting new art forms with considerable public interest. These tools raise recurring questions about their status as creators and their effect on the arts. In this talk, I will discuss how these developments parallel the development of previous artistic technologies, like oil paint, photography, and traditional computer graphics, with many useful analogies between past and current developments. I argue that art is a social phenomenon, that “AI” algorithms will not have human-level intelligence in the foreseeable future, and thus it is extremely unlikely that we will ever consider algorithms to be artists. However they, like past art technologies, will change the way we make and understand art.
Bio:
Aaron Hertzmann is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Research, and Affiliate Faculty at University of Washington. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Art at Rice University and a PhD degree in Computer Science from New York University. He was previously a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto for ten years. He has published over 120 papers in computer graphics, several subfields of AI, and in the science of art. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and winner of the 2024 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.
