Aaron Hertzmann

Here's my the talk for the #SIGGRAPH 2024 Computer Graphics Achievement award, about my experiences in painting, computer graphics and the science of art. And how so much art and research are unplanned and unpredictable. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehgj... aaronhertzmann.com/2024/08/19/j...

yo my colorless green ideas woke up so grumpy today

This was such a great paper. I've been ruminating on the lack of pragmatics in LLM text (inefficient in some ways, overcompressed in others) and they've checked a bunch of issues on the "overcompressed" side (denominalization etc). Really hits why it's so frustrating.

1/2 Three reasons why AI is not conscious - and perhaps never will be. New in @nature.com with Ned Block @neddo.bsky.social and Giulio Tononi www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What is TMLR doing under a 300% increase in submissions? - Suspensions of >150 authors - Publicly naming major violations - Submission quotas distinguishing slop patterns - Desk rejections 6% → 53%; focus on clarity - AI reviews evaluating soundness blog.tmlr.org/2026/adaptin...

I'm dying laughing at how the cat has conformed to her flower shaped bed today

Lots of gratitude to @carlbergstrom.com for quoting probably my favorite of my own sentences about AI at @arl.org

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

I'm noticing a lot of content-free spam images with slogans and memes in my @foryou.club feed today. Is it new or a gradual trend that I hadn't noticed creeping in? Does muting this garbage help, or is my For You feed destined to look like my enshittified Facebook feed? @spacecowboy17.bsky.social

I first learned dynamical systems theory from “Dynamics: the Geometry of Behavior” (1992), a collaboration between mathematician Ralph Abraham and artist Chris D Shaw. The book is over 600 pages long, and the visualizations stay strong and groovy the whole time.

This paper, its commentaries, and the author response are together the best thing I’ve read in a really long time. Not easy reading, but an amazing resource for debates on consciousness, the nature of the brain, and rejoinders to the “consciousness must be computational” views I hear so often.

TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...

sorry about the bad post my account went rogue

Thanks, but actually my favorite line didn't make it to the piece. Does Odysseus feel guilty about the Trojan war? Lots of discourse on this question even though he doesn't exist! Is he conscious? AI agents are fictive characters abstracted from text - like Odysseus.

machines became superhuman at chess just long enough ago for people to somehow not make any connection between that and every event in 2026

FWIW, here are Terence Tao’s slides at the ICM on maths and AI:  teorth.github.io/tao-web/slid... @teorth.bsky.social (I am not endorsing nor criticizing the content, but this is a useful and thoughtful set of points and views in the discussion, from someone who has deeply engaged with the matter)

Nothing changes.

hello everyone, I made this helpful meme to explain how to read scientific papers

movement in non-euclidean quaternionic space

This afternoon at #SIGGRAPH2026! I'll be speaking about the human vision in how people draw pictures; excited to see the other speakers!

This is very good...

Storytelling is, first and foremost, about people, and AI in fiction are typically modified people, not genuine explorations of a scientific concept. Viewers can identify with Data as a smart-but-naive nerd, with Terminator (in T2) as an emotionally-closed-off father figure, etc.