Goldilocks

For a while there, I was using it more than Kagi ... But lately ChatGPT has been really misleading with its answers. It runs off into the weeds ...

Oswald Spengler came up with a rather long story about how civilizations start young, become just right, then dodder off into too-oldism. Parts of the story may actually be true. Elsewhere there's the so-called "Goldilocks zone", or being just about right in space and time. Whether things are actually getting worse (that is, straying from a Goldilocks zone) may be the opinion of an old man yelling at a cloud provider, so it may take a few generations and then historical work or, more troubling for computers, archaeology to try to quantify if things did indeed worsen, and for whom.

Classical music one could argue as having gone off into the weeds,

and least one composer did backtrack to Neoromanticism, so some do recognize when the next thing ain't working aright. This detection is perhaps more difficult in the abstract (music, computer science) where poor performance does not result in, say, a ship that fails to remain upright and afloat, though symphony hall concert ticket subscriptions may also be a proxy for performance of an artform, and some bad ship designs do persist for longer than they rightfully should.