Mathematically it requires less information to impose a certain prior on data in the process of generation than it does to read the data, do error detection and

Mathematically it requires less information to impose a certain prior on data in the process of generation than it does to read the data, do error detection and correction according to a prior, and then return it, if I understand correctly. Something always felt incredibly icky to me about any kind of ad-hoc 'fixer' scripts that were part of a pipeline that was fully controlled by a user.