Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art

7/14/2026 at 10:15:01 AM

Nice! 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?

by quibono

7/14/2026 at 11:48:36 AM

Tolstoy is generally not thought of as a great critic or philosopher.

I don't think it is circular however, if you did not have any feelings and others got feelings from looking at what you did then you did not produce art. If they then went and produced some art based on the feelings they had received from the non-art you produced what they produced would be art.

It's not very well thought out, but not per se circular.

by bryanrasmussen

7/14/2026 at 1:08:22 PM

Yes, good point!

I guess what I meant was: the only way for art to meet one of the ZKP criteria is for us to assume it's art.

by quibono

7/14/2026 at 5:11:49 PM

Yeah this is true, I suppose I sort of swipe it under the rug in the post. Another way to say it is: If the art is Tolstoyan, then we have that it is valid to be used in the ZKP.

by max-amb

7/14/2026 at 8:42:57 AM

>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

by andai

7/14/2026 at 10:04:40 AM

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.

by fer

7/14/2026 at 12:25:49 PM

Also "neuron" should be at least italized.

by pfortuny

7/14/2026 at 9:44:37 AM

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

by fssys

7/14/2026 at 11:18:36 AM

How come, then, that there is no LLM art yet? ;)

by cyclopeanutopia

7/14/2026 at 11:03:18 AM

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.

by applfanboysbgon

7/14/2026 at 11:35:21 AM

It didn't require saying, and you're also wrong. They don't have physical neurons like a brain but they are made up of abstractions we all agree to call neurons

by snapcaster

7/14/2026 at 11:37:00 AM

Which works well and good until people start conflating them with real neurons, suggesting that an abstract nickname for a pattern of code is "experiencing" anything in the same way humans are. It very much required saying because the person I was responding to was suggesting this code genuinely met Tolstoy's definition, a conclusion you could not possibly come to unless you had some kind of grevious misconception.

by applfanboysbgon

7/14/2026 at 11:47:28 AM

Their comment was thoughtful and at least added to conversation. Your comment is just "LLMs don't really have neurons" which is obvious to literally every user of this site including the person you're responding to. Much prefer their contributions over yours

by snapcaster

7/14/2026 at 11:50:20 AM

It is strange to suppose that asserting wrong things is adding to the conversation but pointing out that they are wrong is not.

I should add that though it should be, it is not obvious to every user on this site. Even ELIZA was sufficient for people to lose attachment with reality, and it doesn't help that an estimated trillion dollar company is intentionally muddying the waters, posting press releases about emotions, suggesting their model has a "soul", and musing about "model welfare". There are distressing numbers of people who genuinely believe and will argue that this code is perfectly analogous to human intelligence and emotion. Anthromorphic terminology becomes a problem when it is not understood to be metaphorical and fuels such delusions.

by applfanboysbgon

7/14/2026 at 11:59:11 PM

they have what mimics neurons mathematically and how information flows between different layers and activation functions

i'd suggest taking a course to understand it at a deeper level as you demonstrated a false picture of what LLM is beneath the hood.

by zuzululu

7/14/2026 at 8:52:28 AM

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.

by brna-2

7/14/2026 at 8:52:52 AM

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.

by brna-2

7/14/2026 at 5:13:00 PM

Thank you very much brna-2, feel free to email me :)

by max-amb

7/14/2026 at 8:41:40 AM

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?”

by victorbjorklund

7/14/2026 at 1:04:14 PM

Every good thing is alike, every slop is sloppy in its own way

by CjHuber