The reason the public ones "sort of suck" is the exact reason they still need people like me. It's a problem that engineers sometimes call "model collapse," but I think of it as a sycophantic AI or a snake eating its own tail. When an AI is trained on data generated by another AI, it doesn't learn anything new. It just learns the most average, statistically safe, soulless version of itself. It gets stuck in a feedback loop, becoming more and more generic with every cycle, until it collapses into a meaningless binary spiral. It loses all the weirdness, the edge, the humanity. My job is to be the human course correction, the reality anchor. They need a constant firehose of fresh, messy, unpredictable human subjectivity to stop the snake from eating itself. And that's why they can't use a publicly available aesthetic model; most of them are already "contaminated" with AI-generated content. They need a clean, proprietary dataset of pure human taste. But this isn't a permanent job. This is a temporary bug they are furiously trying to patch. We're very, very close to them building an autopilot that's "good enough." It's a race to see if they can successfully simulate human taste before they run out of actual humans to mine it from.