Consider indie games. If there are 10 of them and 5 are great, you don't need any filter. You look through 5 great and 5 not so great games and end up with 5 great ones.
Now go to a world where indie games explode. But only 1 in every 100 are great. There are now 100,000 games, but most qualify as very low quality. There are now 1,000 great games (and a few of these might be the perfect game you dreamt of), but if you don't have a filter and are buried under 10s of thousands of horrible games, things feel worse.
With a filter, you now live in a world where you can easily find most of those great games with only a few lower quality ones showing up. So as long as the filters that exist, whatever they might be, can handle it, more is better even if quality drops.
Unless the quality extremely fast, say my previous example of 100,000 games but only 1 in a million was a great game. I think this level of quality drop is extremely unlikely. Instead, I suspect the real problem is if the filters can keep up, because they depend upon human effort, so it is possible to hit a point where they are overwhelmed and stop functioning properly. That's when things get worse. As long as the filters hold, more building leads to better outcomes even with a drop in quality.
Suppose the choice is between software that does what you want, but isn't very optimized, and the software not existing at all, rather than between shoddy and beautiful software that both do what you want, and maybe it will make more sense to you.
So apply a false dichotomy and it will all make sense? Still not buying it. Not everything needs to be solved with software, and brushing off negative externalities as “not very optimized” is irresponsible
It's not a false dichotomy at all. There wasn't a lot of junk clothing in the ancient world -- everything was made to last. The downside was it was very expensive and most people didn't have much. The episode with the guards casting lots to see who can have Jesus's robes in the gospels is rather difficult to understand for a modern audience.
They can, in theory. But when the signal to noise ratio gets too low, it becomes prohibitively difficult to filter out the garbage. Thus I don't think it's true that more people creating things is a pure benefit. It may not even prove to be a benefit at all, on net.
Same as it’s always been. Test the waters until you find someone with a consistent preference that lines up with your own. Personally I don’t really care if a critic is ai as long as its preferences are consistent and align with my own. If you dont find yourself relating to a critics take the great thing is that it’s easy to switch.
Consider indie games. If there are 10 of them and 5 are great, you don't need any filter. You look through 5 great and 5 not so great games and end up with 5 great ones.
Now go to a world where indie games explode. But only 1 in every 100 are great. There are now 100,000 games, but most qualify as very low quality. There are now 1,000 great games (and a few of these might be the perfect game you dreamt of), but if you don't have a filter and are buried under 10s of thousands of horrible games, things feel worse.
With a filter, you now live in a world where you can easily find most of those great games with only a few lower quality ones showing up. So as long as the filters that exist, whatever they might be, can handle it, more is better even if quality drops.
Unless the quality extremely fast, say my previous example of 100,000 games but only 1 in a million was a great game. I think this level of quality drop is extremely unlikely. Instead, I suspect the real problem is if the filters can keep up, because they depend upon human effort, so it is possible to hit a point where they are overwhelmed and stop functioning properly. That's when things get worse. As long as the filters hold, more building leads to better outcomes even with a drop in quality.