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, Dr. Aaron Hertzmann 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. Dr. Hertzmann argues that art is a social phenomenon — that “AI” algorithms will not have human-level intelligence in the foreseeable future — and so it is extremely unlikely that we will consider algorithms to be artists either. However, they, like past art technologies, will change the way we make and understand art, for better and for worse.