Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art

andai•about 2 hours ago

>This is as Tolstoy tells us that it is sincerity that “separates art from its adulterations”. Therefore, if the artist did not truly experience the feelings, the piece of work they produce would not be sincere, and hence not art.

LLMs have neurons relating to emotion.[0] It reasonably follows that generative art networks do too, which would make their art genuine by Tolstoy's definition. (I don't think he would have been happy to hear this, though!)

Although, "truly experienced the feelings" implies something more than mere mechanical neural activations... the problem becomes the hard problem of consciousness. (Does the enslaved linear algebra really suffer, or only seem to suffer? Perhaps there are beings observing us now, asking the same questions about us.)

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

fer•31 minutes ago

LLMs have neurons related to things that cluster in a vector space, some of them are tokens that describe emotion (but that hypes less).

It can be emotions or anything else, but in the end it's just tokens. Taking it to the extreme, an LLM can endlessly talk about self-transforming machine elves, but it certainly hasn't experienced them.

fssys•about 1 hour ago

these anthropic press releases do have a tendency to sensationalise so possibly not a good source

brna-2•about 2 hours ago

Respect for the thoughts. Now that you got me thinking about Tolstoyan Art it sounds like zero pre-shared knowledge emotional information transfer attempt to me - Which would be cool. It sounds a bit more like discovering an universal graphical language for emotion transfer then inventing one - where inventing would require the observer to go trough schools to learn and understand, while discovering universal communication graphical tools the information(feeling) would be mostly understood instantly. Really cool topic to think deeper about.

brna-2•about 2 hours ago

Want to try out being an artist now. :D

Also Max, I have a hunch we could be friends. I will make sure to read your work. You have a follower.

victorbjorklund•about 2 hours ago

Tolstoy’s 1897 book, what is art? 1, he discusses what it means for some piece of work to be art. In chapter V, he states that the activity of art is

”To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling.”

Furthermore,

”Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”

Not what the article is about but I think this is a good quote on the ”is genai art?”

Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art

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