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I think these are categorically different than math: the theorem prover languages are at least a clear Boolean success criterion. "Is this painting/book good?" is canonically an opinion question without a singular answer.
From what I can tell, human-driven post-training has historically been done with English speakers hireable at low hourly rates, but probably not ones that appreciate Ulysses (I certainly haven't read it). Even if they could afford English department grad students, would they be willing to train, effectively, their replacements? How do you rank the writing styles of Faulkner versus Hemingway? It seems there is at least some room for legitimate creativity there.
Artistic style isn't just a matter of opinion, it's a matter of opinion in a specific context.
I swear the above sentence was an accident, and I only noticed what I was doing halfway through, but it'll work perfectly as a demonstration too. Aren't you sick of that "It's not X, it's Y" idiom right now? Judicious use of thesis/antithesis pairs was compelling back in the Before Times of 5 years ago, but because it was compelling RLHF seized upon it as Good Writing, and so now AI writing uses it everywhere and we're sick of it. Not that you loved Caesar less, but that you loved Rome more? Learn to write for yourself, Will, you hack!
Great art is supposed to have a timeless quality too, but a lot of good art is directly speaking to the wider artistic milieu of its time, and making choices about what styles and tropes can be used unashamedly vs what have become cliches that must be avoided or subverted. This is normally a stable system, because as something becomes briefly overused it immediately begins to repel other potential users, but if a huge swath of humanity is using the same handful of systems that are trained on the same total-corpus-of-human-art then we lose a lot of that stabilizing negative feedback, and the results we get stuck with are hard to avoid via simple instruction alone.
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