Can Computers Create Art?
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 at 6 p.m. *Event duration to be confirmed
Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus
*Registration information coming Winter 2025
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.
