AI Can Be a Critic Unless Biases Are Hard Wired
June 26, 2025
The Internet has made it harder to find certain music, films, and art. It was supposed to be quite the opposite, and it was for a time. But social media and its algorithms have made a mess of things. So asserts the blogger at Tadaima in, “If Nothing Is Curated, How Do We Find Things?” The write up reports:
“As convenient as social media is, it scatters the information like bread being fed to ducks. You then have to hunt around for the info or hope the magical algorithm gods read your mind and guide the information to you. I always felt like social media creates an illusion of convenience. Think of how much time it takes to stay on top of things. To stay on top of music or film. Think of how much time it takes these days, how much hunting you have to do. Although technology has made information vast and reachable, it’s also turned the entire internet into a sludge pile.”
Slogging through sludge does take the fun out of discovery. The author fondly recalls the days when a few hours a week checking out MTV and Ebert and Roeper, flipping through magazines, and listening to the radio was enough to keep them on top of pop culture. For a while, curation websites deftly took over that function. Now, though, those have been replaced by social-media algorithms that serve to rake in ad revenue, not to share tunes and movies that feed the soul. The write up observes:
“Criticism is dead (with Fantano being the one exception) and Gen Alpha doesn’t know how to find music through anything but TikTok. Relying on algorithms puts way too much power in technology’s hands. And algorithms can only predict content that you’ve seen before. It’ll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble. Oh, you like shoegaze? Well, that’s all the algorithm is going to give you until you intentionally start listening to something else.”
Yep. So the question remains: How do we find things? Big tech would tell us to let AI do it, of course, but that misses the point. The post’s writer has settled for a somewhat haphazard, unsatisfying method of lists and notes. They sadly posit this state of affairs might be the “new normal.” This type of findability “normal” may be very bad in some ways.
Cynthia Murrell, June 26, 2025
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