[sebzim4500]

>Firstly what makes you think only the best output from 4 will go into future training sets? It’s just as likely to be the most bizarre or ludicrous

That's true now, because LLMs are new so the failure cases are still interesting. If we are talking about a hypothetical world in which LLM outputs are a significant portion of the internet, then most of it would be from reddit comments/tweets/HN posts/buzzfeed articles/etc.

Then if you take only the ones which have more than average views/upvotes/etc. you should expect to get the 'best' results.

[simonh]

I'm still not convinced that's a reliable indicator of quality. It's potentially a measure of popularity or entertainment value, or maybe pandering to preconceptions but that's not at all the same thing.

Ask yourself, what are your from-scratch metrics for quality that you would like to select for. Then consider what are the likely or possible criteria people actually have for upvoting stuff on reddit. I'll think you'll find there is probably very little correlation between those. This is called the alignment problem and it's very hard to get right.