You aren't accounting for volume.

How does volume explain why something low-quality would be called the best quality?

If volume can hack wins at awards, that's a fault in the award system, which is precisely the second hypothesis.

	▲	TheCoelacanth 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because there are a million literary awards and some of them are awarded by people who are bad at recognizing quality. Additionally, many of these cases were only partially created using AI or aren't proven to have actually used AI or used AI in a creative and non-conventional way and that's what they won for.
	▲	qwery 17 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's a chart that shows the number of things going up over time. The total number of things increasing over time is going to play a hugely significant role in that, regardless of how broken the selection criteria are.