It didn’t take long.

“Tinsel and Beau are back!” said one 1983 advertisement in The Baltimore Sun. “Our talking deer make such a charming couple, and what wonderful conversationalists they are!”

What I learned next, however, was that Tinsel and Beau weren’t robotic at all. A classified ad that Hutzler’s placed in The Baltimore Sun in 1986 offered a “fun opportunity for drama or theater students to be the voices of our famous talking reindeer.”

Tinsel and Beau were people!

Which, I mean, of course they were people. It seems silly now that I ever thought otherwise. Department stores in the 1980s didn’t just go around buying high-tech robotic reindeer that could carry on lengthy conversations with little kids. We’re talking about an era when Teddy Ruxpin—a furry tape cassette housed in the body of a mechanical bear—was considered a technological marvel. If you wanted to have a chat with a mobile device, your best bet was to get a Speak ‘n’ Spell to burp out the alphabet in your direction.

And yet my misplaced memory of the reindeer is understandable, maybe, given how dramatically the world has changed in the past 35 years. It’s the same reason that people today are surprised to learn that R2-D2, the lovable whistling droid from the Star Wars franchise, was operated by a human actor. (Today, another actor operates the unit for some shots; while a radio-controlled device is used for others, according to The Guardian.)

In a world of digital assistants and computer-generated imagery, the expectation is that computers do all kinds of work for humans. The result of which, some have argued, is a dulling of the senses. “The miraculous has become the norm,” Jonathan Romney wrote in an essay about computer-generated imagery for Aeon. “Such a surfeit of wonders may be de-sensitizing, but it’s also eroding our ability to dream at the movies.”

Our ability to dream, elsewhere in the arts, may be intact, but computers are encroaching on all sorts of creative territory. There are computers that can forge famous paintings with astounding accuracy—and there are algorithms designed to identify such fakes. Artificial intelligences can already write novels, and there’s at least one literary contest—the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award—that’s open to non-human competitors. Computers can flirt. They can write jokes. (Not great ones, but hey.)

Computers are now so pervasive that we should expect them to be everywhere. The past is quickly becoming a place where the presence of humans, talking reindeer and otherwise, is now surprising. That’s likely to continue, and to expand into our most creative spaces. “The unresolved questions about machine art are, first, what its potential is and, second, whether—irrespective of the quality of the work produced—it can truly be described as ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative,’” Martin Gayford wrote in an essay for MIT Technology Review last year. “These are problems, profound and fascinating, that take us deep into the mysteries of human art-making.”