Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
max-amb.github.io
Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
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Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#2Tolstoy’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?”
Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#3>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
Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#4Respect 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.
Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#5Respect 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 communi…
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.
Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#6>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…
these anthropic press releases do have a tendency to sensationalise so possibly not a good source
Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#7>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…
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.
Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#8Nice! I like this, not a connection I would have thought of!
> Therefore, if the artist did not truly experience the feelings, the piece of work they produce would not be sincere, and hence not art. This also covers malicious attempts to produce a piece of art without having experienced the feelings. As the art is a successful representation of the agreed upon feelings, and the art is a Tolstoyan piece of art, the artist must have truly experienced them.
Isn't that circular? If I "fake" a Jackson Pollock style painting without having any feeling whatsoever AND it manages to evoke feelings in the viewer, who's to say which feelings are the agreed upon ones?
Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#9>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…
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Re: Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
#10>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…
LLMs have lines of code which statistically classify groupings of characters or pixels. It is concerning that this apparently requires saying, but they do not have neurons.