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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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