Equation 13 · The Bandwidth of Culture: Transmission Fidelity to 2100
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Symbol rho_t
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is the net machine-mediated contribution: positive where model-assisted re-emission genuinely helps a human originator reach or refine an audience they could not otherwise reach, negative where it substitutes synthetic recombination for content that would otherwise have required, and thereby preserved, a human transmission chain. The mechanism Shumailov and colleagues describe operates by pulling itself down as the share of machine-mediated content in what gets re-ingested rises:
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