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Slop is already enough. Slop is something that can satisfy the lowest common denominator, and if /u/self_made_human believes he is close to being able to enjoy AI writing, so will be the common Joe. Then again, that same man recommended a Chinese web novel with atrocious writing style to people, so maybe his bar is lower than many.
Even if AI can only output quality up to 80th percentile, that's putting 80% of people in that area out of a job.
Taste is inherently subjective, and I raise an eyebrow all the way to my hairline when people act as if there's something objective involved. Not that I think slop is a useless term, it's a perfectly cromulent word that accurately captures low-effort and an appeal to the LCD.
Fang Yuan, my love, he didn't mean it! It's a good novel, this is the hill I'm ready to die on.
I've enjoyed getting Gemini 2.5 and Grok 3 to write a new version of Journey to the West in Scott Alexander's style. Needs an edit pass, but it's close to something you'd pay money for.
PS: You need to @ instead of u/. That links to a reddit account, and doesn't ping.
Not to worry, I'm on the ten year blizzard arc right now so you can let out the breath of turbid air you've been holding. I imagine a modern LLM would have done a great job even just adapting the English translation into something that doesn't feel like the author's paid by the line.
You can do that right now if you cared to.
Find a site like piaotian that has raw Chinese chapters. Throw it into a good model. Prompt to taste. Ideally save that prompt to copy and paste later.
I did that for a hundred chapters of Forty Millenniums of Cultivation when the English translation went from workable to a bad joke, and it worked very well.
(Blizzard arc was great. The only part of the book I recall being a bit iffy was the very start)
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Well prompted frontier models write better than 99% of published writers. At least a few page long texts.
People are already abusing the shit out of this going by openrouter data.
I've done dozens, or even a hundred pages with good results. An easy trick is to tell it to rip off the style of someone you like. Scott is easy pickings, ACX and SSC is all over the training corpus. Banks, Watts and Richard Morgan work too.
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You don't need LLMs or modern AI to flood the world with slop. Recommender algorithms optimised for engagement metrics were developed at a lower tech level, and are quite sufficient to pull the stinkiest, stickiest, sloppiest slop from the collective hivemind that is the Internet and flood our consciousness with it like Vikings singing loudly about a tinned meat product*. Worse still, recommender algorithms incentivise creators to optimise for the algo and find ways to make the slop even sloppier.
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of slop, constantly increasing and constantly growing sloppier. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of false novelty, the sensation of effortless pleasure, entirely familiar yet entirely new. If you want a picture of the future, imagine MrBeast eating childrens' brains — forever. ”
* SPAM(r) is, FWIW, culinary slop. I'm not cross with Hormel foods - at the time if you were focussed on low cost and long shelf life you probably couldn't do better.
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Sure, might be true for stuff like books/art/music. I might argue that this has been happening for a long time, without AI, due to the centralizing effects of globalization and the internet. Why pay to listen to Joe Shmoe and his band play at a local bar when you can listen to the best of the best on your phone at any time?
In terms of customer service though, the slop is not good enough. It's not 80th percentile, it's 10th percentile. Maybe it can get better, but I don't really think so based on how these models are built. AI is just pattern recognition on a massive scale, it can't actually think. The best it's ever going to be in customer service is the equivalent of an Indian in a call center reading off a script. That's not good enough.
I'm big picture with you on the skepticisim, but this actually sounds like a huge upgrade. I can be mean to an AI, feel no guilt, and expect it to actually work out well for me. Oppositely for a person. Nothing irritates me quite as much as bad call center customer service, since I know it's not their fault really, but it's SO BAD.
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I suspect they just haven't tried hard enough (the people tuning the LLMs for their customer service, that is). The bots installed in customer service that I've seen were much worse than even the basic Gemini or Deepseek or whatever is the newest conversational model.
In most cases of tech support the precise thing the AI has to do is to... recognize the pattern. It can already do better than an Indian reading a script in that regard. The remaining 5% of people with bespoke problems that it can't immediately pattern match can be referred directly to humans.
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