A Washington Post article suggests that, beyond a certain threshold, larger homes don't make people happier. Instead, well-being is correlated with affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods where they feel socially connected. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Hey everyone! I have enough publications to stop working for the rest of the year!

It’s tough to listen to recordings of my dog barking and howling intermittently while she learns to stay home alone, but I did like this auto-transcription produced by the audio recording app (Apple Voice Memos)

Most LLM evals use API calls or offline inference, testing models in a memory-less silo. Our new Patterns paper shows this misses how LLMs actually behave in real user interfaces, where personalization and interaction history shape responses: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19364

People say that the new "AI"-based ads look like garbage, but the Brian Eno quote is relevant: people learn to appreciate the quirks of a style. The tastes here are about associations, e.g., if people who hate "AI" take the glitches as signifying "AI", then people will hate the glitches.

Historian Thomas Hughes argued that technologies are malleable when young, then harden. Right now we're still shaping AI, or at least it is being shaped by our institutions, norms & use cases Eventually these systems build a momentum of their own. That is why choices now matter, things are fluid.

I’m really enjoying @wdavidmarx.bsky.social 's wonderful new book “Blank Space.” He argues that 21st century “poptimism,” a belief in the value of all styles of music has led to a loss of cultural innovation; we no longer have movements of disco rejecting rock, punk rejecting disco, etc. 1/

As we in the US gather with our families this weekend, it's a good time to consider the ways that technology brings us together—but also keeps us apart. In this blog post, I tell a story about how technology may have tended to increase social isolation. aaronhertzmann.com/2025/10/26/i...

Today I learned that the US poverty line is still calculated as 3x the minimum food diet in 1963, a metric completely disconnected from today’s cost of living. Here's a clear post explaining why middle and working class families are effectively getting poorer. www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...

These technologies illustrate how much of our culture follows common patterns

This is the best parody of the AGI2027 report to date. Unintentionally from the Dallas Fed

In vision science/psychology, I've often gotten adversarial paper reviews that do not seem to engage with the core argument of the paper, but instead list many perceived flaws. As I am new to the field, I thought maybe the culture is to only list flaws, and then accept when flaws are fixed. 1/

Wednesday, November 5th at 11 AM CT: TTIC's Distinguished Lecture Series presents Aaron Hertzmann of Adobe Research with a talk titled "Can Computers Create Art?" Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Thanks for the kind words! The talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2YR...

Here's a recording of my talk on the role of computers in making art, including so-called "AI", which was presented as the opening keynote of SIGGRAPH 2025, incorporating lessons from the history of computer graphics, photography, modern art, and philosophy of art. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2YR... 1/

All reports in this thread are from the collections of Northwestern University's Transportation Library. Materials we've digitized can generally be found in HathiTrust. Learn more and search our catalog here: www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-co...

Fascinating paper argues that (roughly) consciousness theories are untestable and unverifiable, and so instead they are selected to fit our moral preferences and preconceptions.

New blog post: In 1909, the famous composer John Philip Sousa wrote that recorded music would lead to a deterioration of music and musical taste. The more I thought about it, the more I think that he had a point. aaronhertzmann.com/2025/09/30/m...

Here's a recording of my talk on how perspective works! If you're interested in learning about how picture perspective works in human vision, this is the video to watch. #visionscience www.youtube.com/watch?v=eamc...

Great to present my work "Five Illusions Challenge Our Understanding of Visual Experience" at the European Conference on Visual Perception (#ECVP2025) Project Website + Preprint in link below 👇 @ecvp.bsky.social @italianacademy.bsky.social @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social

Here is my commentary on @ruthrosenholtz.bsky.social's BBS paper. I point out deep parallels between topics in 2D and 3D human vision that are usually studied separately: summary statistics and attention in 2D, and 3D vision. This suggests studying them together. psyarxiv.com/dz3rx_v2

me: maybe i can gain clarity by going over my notes my notes:

Our cognitive maps of the environment contain hierarchical structure, with some spaces nested in others. Behavioral responses and brain activity in scene-responsive regions reflect this hierarchical structure. Neat new work by Michael Peer & @russellepstein.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

Here's a list of some of the non-fiction books that profoundly affected my thinking at one time or another. aaronhertzmann.com/2025/09/15/b...

I'm always invoking conceptualism when people decry the loss of the human in art-making. Dematerialization of the art object, procedural art, &c. We're re-litigating aesthetic practices revolutionized decades ago

incredible Ada Lovelace quote highlighted in a talk by Steve Furber. She spells out the dream of computational neuroscience, 2 centuries ago. The sheer ambition 🤩

I wrote about the tragic death of Adam Raine and the venal negligence of "AI Safety." www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...

Aaron Hertzmann giving an inspiring keynote address to kick off the Visual Science of Art Conference in Wiesbaden: #VSAC @vsac-social.bsky.social

Looking forward to our workshop on Sunday!

Not picking on this person, I think i see this kind of claim often. But like railways were absolutely a massive hype bubble. People were saying there was going to be polar loops, rail links across the bearing strait, 24-hour transcontinental, saying every rail town would be 100k big.

Did Philomena Cunk write this

I'm very excited to announce our #SIGGRAPH2025 workshop: Drawing & Sketching: Art, Psychology, and Computer Graphics 🎨🧠🫖 🔗 lines-and-minds.github.io 📅 Sunday, August 10th Join us to explore how people draw, how machines draw, and how the two might draw together! 🤖✍️

Using time series graphs to make causal claims be like

Science fiction often probes the human condition by imagining human-like AI. Almost all science fiction AIs are “human, but slightly different.” Popular culture AIs paved the way for AI hype by making it very easy—natural, even—to imagine human-like machine people.

This new blog post describes some toxic peer reviews I've received in vision science, in terms of NVC. I discuss a simple rule that would fix the problem (already used at SIGGRAPH, CVPR): reviews should be about the paper, not the authors. aaronhertzmann.com/2025/06/23/n...

Here's a new blog post about Non-Violent Communication (NVC), a useful technique for difficult conversations, and how some NVC ideas could be useful scientific and technical communication. I even make an analogy of NVC to the concept of "umwelt". aaronhertzmann.com/2025/06/23/n...

Next up is the CREATIVITY session in our @cogscisociety.bsky.social Minds in the Making workshop ft. @aaronhertzmann.com @manishsaggar.bsky.social & Aaron Kozbelt! Thursday June 19th, 11am-12pm PT. Register here: stanford.zoom.us/meeting/regi...!

This week at @cvprconference.bsky.social, we present the paper with my favorite acronym: MaDCoW, for rendering wide-angle photographs without marginal distortion. Details: openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR...

🖌️ On creativity (6/19, 11am-12pm PT): @aaronhertzmann.com @manishsaggar.bsky.social & Aaron Kozbelt

Just received the most vicious, ad hominem review from Journal of Vision that I've ever received. With such reviews in the past, I've always been able to fix the paper and publish it, and this paper needs a lot of fixes. But it's shocking to me that journals allow such toxic behavior. #VisionScience

How does perspective work in art and photography? In a new paper, we describes experiments suggesting answers to age-old questions about how people perceive perspective. 1/ #VisionScience
#Art #ArtHistory www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📺 Now available: Watch the recording of Aaron Hertzmann's talk, "Can Computers Create Art?" www.youtube.com/watch?v=40CB... @uoftartsci.bsky.social

Why I love subways & public transport: www.christophniemann.com/detail/subwa...

Mister Rogers never misses

Everyone can learn to draw. IMO the most important things are (a) abandon self-judgement and self-criticism (“I’m a bad artist”), (b) practice practice practice, (c) drawing exercises or classes.

Newsletter: The real threat isn't AI using open knowledge — it's AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free. The future of free and open access isn't saying “wait, not like that” — it’s saying "yes, like that, but under fair terms”. www.citationneeded.news/free-and-ope...

1. @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself have a new piece in Science on "AI" Large Models, pushing back against much of the collective wisdom about what they can and can't do. Official below, unpaywalled at henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod... . So why this now?

Meet us at the intersection of creativity and AI. Join us on April 1 for, “Can computers create art?” with @aaronhertzmann.bsky.social of Adobe Research and @uwcse.bsky.social. This talk is part of the C.C. "Kelly" Gotlieb Distinguished Lecture Series. Register to attend: uoft.me/blM

VSAC 2025 is honoured to welcome our keynote speakers! One of them will be Aaron Hertzmann. @aaronhertzmann.bsky.social Find more information on 2025.vsac.eu #VSAC2025 #Conference #VisualScienceofArt VISUAL SCIENCE OF ARI Keynote