alt Hacker News>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
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How come, then, that there is no LLM art yet? ;)
these anthropic press releases do have a tendency to sensationalise so possibly not a good source
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.
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.