Judges
The number in a human review
When a judge gives a number it is a rhetorical gesture inside a performance, and reading it as data misunderstands what was bought.
Guides on Judges: Boundaries belong to the judge, The case against the price list, What the skill in judging actually is
A judge who ends a clip with "I'd give this an eight" is not scoring you. They are landing a line, in whatever register the clip has been in for the previous two minutes, and the number is doing the same work as the rest of the sentence around it.
Where the number actually comes from
A number inside a human review is chosen the way a punchline is chosen: for effect, in the moment, to land the register the clip has been building. An eight in a worship clip and an eight in an honest one are not measuring the same thing, because neither is measuring anything at all - both are the judge finding a way to say "good" or "better than most" that fits the tone. Ask a different judge, on a different day, and the number moves for reasons that have nothing to do with what is in the photo. Research on attractiveness ratings points the same way: across three experiments, Hönekopp (2006) found private taste "about as powerful as shared taste" in how people judged faces. That is not inconsistency in the sense that would matter if this were a measurement; it is a person responding to a specific brief, which is the entire service, not a flaw in it.
What a score actually is, elsewhere
A genuine score comes from an instrument built to hold still: the same input returns close to the same output every time, which is what a dedicated scoring tool is for and what a person, by design, is not. If a stable number is the actual goal, that tool is the right one to ask, and a judge is not a worse version of it - they are answering a different question. The same logic applies to size: if the number you want is a length, a stated measurement is the honest route, and quoting it to a judge saves them guessing at something they were never equipped to estimate. An AI model sits somewhere between the two, consistent because it was built and tested to be, which is a different kind of reliability than either a person's opinion or a ruler.
Asking for one anyway
There is nothing wrong with wanting a number at the end of a clip - plenty of buyers do, and plenty of judges give one happily. The useful move is asking for it as a flourish rather than briefing the whole clip around it, because a clip built to justify a figure tends to be a worse clip than one that simply responds to you and lands a number as its closing gesture. Want the figure to mean something you can compare against another figure? That comparison lives with Rate Cock's own guide to choosing between an AI judge and a human one, which lays out what each side is actually for.