Reputation Systems in the AI World

Every art world has a mechanism for converting the abundance of production into a ranked hierarchy of reputation, directing the attention of audiences and the money of patrons toward work the system deems best. The French Salon. Radio airplay. Academic citations. Becker observed that reputation systems become more important as production becomes more abundant, because the ratio of what exists to what any individual can attend to grows. The system does not merely reflect quality; it constructs it. Work the system elevates is treated as good; work it ignores is treated as nonexistent. The AI world faces a reputation problem of unprecedented scale because the tools have made production so easy that volume overwhelms any existing mechanism for sorting it. Its current reputation systems — inherited from social media — are crude, misaligned with what most participants say they value, and reward qualities that may not be the qualities that matter.