It's not even programmed to give an answer similar to what a correct one might look like. It simply chooses each word based on the probability of what the next one might be based on its dataset.
Yes! In middle school, I read three different versions of Little Women (as originally written, simplified, and more simplified). It was interesting to see the differences -- but I would NOT trust AI to do it.
It's called the stories of Wishbone, making classic novels digestible for children with the help of an adorable Jack Russel since 1996. I read a bunch of those as a kid.
This is like automated captions, or translations. Not as good as hand made, but infinitely cheaper, and so infinitely more available. (And available *in parallel* with the original)
But if you want to donate your time to producing bespoke simplifications of classics nobody is stopping you
And occasionally a well simplified version will find a market. But for the other million books published every year we now have a free alternative. Not sure how that's a bad thing.
LLMs are excellent at producing summaries. They're a useful tool
Like, this stupid ad is just gladly cheering on the meat-grinderfication of reading as an activity you can do, at all. It's as soulless and all-but-dead as the people it's championed by.
Even the example changes the meaning. The AI version I’m more likely to assume some upsetting family history than advice. And that’s the thing they picked to show us!
There's also a lot of potential for them to intentionally change the meaning of books. Imagine it spinning Gatsby or Grapes of Wrath into celebrations of capitalism...
I don’t even like reading books (adhd) but I do like READING - learning new words, new concepts, etc. What’s the point in reading a work of fiction, where word choice and writing style are part of the whole vibe — if you’re going to actually dumb it down and strip it of character??
Because they know that "smart people read", but don't want to make the effort, so they think this is a way to read and "be smart" without putting any effort into actually getting smarter by reading challenging books.
“I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes”
Yeah, I don't really have a problem with someone rewriting/abridging classics to make them easier to read. The AI part is what makes this turbo-cursed.
yea this isn't like 'Sparknotes helps make books digestable' kinda stuff this is pure 'we fed classics into a robot and they sanded them down into nothingness so you can 'maximize reading potential'
When I was a little kid, I read quite a few simplified novels (the ones I remember best are Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment), and I think the experience was overall negative, because when I ended up reading the full books as a teen, I went in with established and largely incorrect expectations.
Adding illustrations or whatnot to the existing text of a novel or story, or doing a comic adaptation or the like imho isn't at all on par with running something through the AI mulch-machine, yeah.
the generative AI craze has revealed this whole massive tranche of people who, although they seem fully literate and even educated, *just hate reading*. And those people are my enemy.
Cliff and his fellow note editors can recognize and condense the thematic arcs of the work, which this language model cannot do. It’s just machine translation from English to Simple English.
For sure. Same as translation. And neither should be given over to AI.
But some of language in this thread comes across as ableist ("dumbed down", etc.). Just like visually impaired folks arenʻt only ones who use alt-text, learners or cognitively impaired read simpler books based on existing texts.
Dumbed-down was a poor choice, yes. But I’m always going to bristle at the evisceration of another writer’s works just as I’d object to the repainting of Goya or rearranging of Liszt.
We should works of appropriate difficulty for those who need them; not destroy someone’s creation to fit.
Yeah that's a good point. There are already books that are written at lower reading levels that they can use before getting to these "harder" books. This is overtly a bad thing
I have reviewed some materials intended for younger/newer readers. It included excerpts from The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Poetic Edda, but it was clear there was an attempt to preserve the feel/style of the original work AND intentionally build vocabulary, grammar. This takes skill.
Retellings of myths etc are common in children’s literature and there are many examples of abridged and shortened versions of classic novels in children’s books but they aren’t rephrasing each and every sentence in the book to be worse lol
Lower language-level versions of classics have existed for over 100 years. This app isn't doing anything new except that you can modify the reading level on the fly and it includes definitions of words.
They also have books of short stories where the French and English version are side by side so you can struggle in one language and check yourself before turning the page.
When Madeleine l'Engle was asked to simplify the vocabulary in one of her books she pointed out that Beatrix Potter used "soporific" in Peter Rabbit. Put in a glossary if some of the words are likely to be unfamiliar.
I taught ESL. They read the actual book. And they could read it in their own language to compare and to help grasp the nuances. But they read the actual book.
It's for people who think a book is only about the bones of the plot
... these are the same people who go around trying to tell writers about their idea for a book "that only needs someone like you to write it" so you can split the cash 50/50
The funny thing here is that the concept of taking classics and simplifying them has existed for a long time, it's just that it was marketed directly at children and not, presumably, grown men who think they need to lit-maxx whatever
And making entertaining adaptations to other media like comics or movies or TV shows is a whole art form in itself! The same with creative “retelling” (like retelling Shakespeare as prose stories for kids.)
It’s not just “run it through a blender and reduce it to the most rudimentary elements”
"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God."
HOLY... Ugh. I get it. Sort of. But the original sentence is just so fucking good.
I teach reading. I want stories to be more accessible. I get them more accessible by teaching better reading. I know that's not always possible, so I help everyone I can.
Culture isn't something to be fed into a meat processor and extruded out by ethically-bankrupt tech companies. The only purpose this serve is to produce a poorly-educated underclass that can be perpetually exploited.
Why have sometime hi through the trouble to read and understand a book so as to effectively summarize it ($$$$) when you could put it through the Word Mangler (¢)?
ShrinkLits: Seventy of the World's Towering Classics Cut Down to Size from 1980 did this with great humor, not the dumbing down the above seems intent to enable.
I made the mistake of reading a simplified version of Trollope's Can You Forgive Her after reading the original first. A detailed description of a green drawing room which delimits the family gets stripped down to "The green drawing room was too green." I shut it and took it back to the library.
Honestly torn, i like the idea of accessibility, but also as an author I'm egotistical enough to think my prose, my cadence, my jumble; is often more important than my tale.
But your prose and cadence are what make it YOUR voice! Like, this is possibly helpful for someone learning a language or maybe alongside the text for clarity (like how some Shakespeare is published, or dual language books), but it strips away beauty and individuality.
I'm a headless chicken all day today but I'll reach out to you during the week. I figure interviewing different artists/writers I respect once a month is more interesting than my usual vague rambling
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
In “The Well of Lost Plots” (the 3rd Thursday Next book), which has what at first glance appears to be a minor subplot about an OS called UltraWord that “fixes” literature, when a piece of poetry receives treatment similar to this Gatsby one, it causes people to recoil against said OS en masse.
Eh,
1) Cliff's Notes always have existed.
2) People who used Cliff's Notes and this type of thing were and are uninteresting people, who interesting and good people, have always been able to suss out and not associate with...
3) Those ppl just become boring ass tech bros now
OK, so everybody is going off on this app. And I understand the knee-jerk reaction, because I had the same one! On reflection, though, looking at the listing for this in the App Store, I get the idea that the intent is not to make books stupider, but to help combat adult illiteracy.
Of course, we can agree or disagree on whether or not this kind of app is a good tool for improving literacy. But looking at the way they’re promoting it (“Learn New Words!”), I do come away with the impression the motives here are more altruistic than people are giving it credit for.
I see it for people ramping up their reading skill or helping people read. But it's also erasing the beauty of the prose. Depending on who's inputting the text, it could also be a cheap and easy way for the company to get more training data, possibly bending/breaking copyright law?
Every bit of clever wordplay debuffs your reading potential, man! Just Dick & Jane everything to read more and maximize your reading score! More is always better! More is always the answer!
Love the idea of making classics easier to read especially where writing style is drastically different from modern speech pattern. Fucking despise the idea of having an AI decide how to condense and simplify great literature without losing anything in the process.
I think it may be aimed at English as a second language learners.
I get books similar to these that are in "français facile" but they are written by a human to try to keep the author's style. For some books, it's more trouble than it's worth. Completely guts the original of why you would read it.
I think it's great for language learners! They often miss a LOT of cultural references in conversations and media because they don't have access to the culture itself. Once they improve their skills they can read the original.
You're completely right, cos if you just want to know the plot, read the Wikipedia summary. (I do this all the time with horror movies, cos I am a big wimp.)
Just had a friend I shared this with jump down my throat about how it’s accessibility. If you chew up a fancy meal and spit it into my mouth, you haven’t given me accessibility to haute cuisine. You’ve betrayed that you don’t understand art and that you hold me in contempt.
Yeah, there is nothing wrong about not being comfortable reading more convoluted texts. But the solution is not to dumb down stuff already written into mush, but to read more. And then people can manually use tools on specific sentences they think are hard, to understand them.
Yup. I opened a dictionary from time to time when I was a kid if I came across a new-to-me word. I didn't resent the author for being "over my head". I took it as a chance to GET MORE WORDS.
I disagree. I think there's a place for Simple English and abridged versions of books, there are a lot of people who struggle with reading and language processing for whom footnotes just make it more cluttered.
Whether AI is capable of that translation is another matter.
Yeah, this doesn’t seem like a tool for people who like to read books. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of money in selling books to people who don’t read books
At work our training site
that provides condensed versions of popular business books. 250 pgs down to 20 or so. Given how poorly written and repetitive business books can be, the few times I’ve read both I found there wasn’t much value lost. But that’s just cause the originals suck so much.
Yeah, a big problem here is that the narrator of the Great Gatsby is a specific person, the kind of person who uses the syntax on the left, and who wouldn't refer to his father as 'dad' in that context. So the use of language is conveying important information, it's not just to be 'hard'.
Not that different from corrections made to my essays tbh. I can't say they were all wrong, I'm not an accomplished writer in any field, but still it felt like my style was being denied.
The whole attitude of "I refuse to grow or learn in order to interact with the art, but I will forcibly bring the art down to me" is beyond grotesque. A story isn't just a recitation of events. It's not just the WHAT, it's the HOW! I can't believe we have to say it, but THE WORD CHOICE MATTERS.
When it comes to AI boosters it's pretty clear that the goal is to bring it down *below* their level, so that they are finally justified in their contempt for it.
It's essentially the Google translate trick, where you crash text through a dozen languages and see how it goes when it comes back to English, but it would be interesting
I had thought about that but discarded it bc it doesn't include the listener, but knowing your dad said it implies that you were probably the listener so well done
poor boy is rich now yet sad lady can't love him because class is permanent. green light? orgastic future? no: only the past. as an AI large language model, I—
Holy cow, you improve your reading proficiency by reading harder books. I didn't stop at Encyclopedia Brown and say okay now everything needs to be exactly at this level.
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well."
I love the book too, it's style over substance but that's not always a bad thing at all, and being at the intersection of classic lit and junk food reading is a highly cool place to occupy
I hate that it's AI doing this. It's can't preserve nuance.
I don't necessarily hate making easier versions of books for people who aren't strong readers yet. I think a lot about Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, adapted in the 1860s for very young kids to learn to read.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
I think the person who might use this for language issues might rather just try something than this service.
Like sparknotes. I tried to picture someone who could use this, and I think they'll benefit from sparknotes more for understanding prose and text better.
Curious to see whether if you passed a James Ellroy novel or something with a similar shorthand style into the Prose-Blandifier-2000 it would come back four times as long
❌Whan that Aprille with hir shoures soote
The drought of Marche hathe perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich liquor
Of which vertu engendred is the flower
[…]
In fairness, it offers the option to dial difficulty up (original text) or down (simple) and is marketed as an aid for young, non-native, or disabled readers—but yeah, on the face of it, that does look pretty dystopian in a “this ain’t Shakespeare” sort of way. I mean, what if it _is_ Shakespeare?
I spend so much time making sure my characters have unique voices, both when they speak and when they think, because it is an important part of how you see their character.
Do these people really not understand that?
No wait, they just want all their characters to be the same white dude.
ngl I had a high school English teacher who would literally read a simplified summary of every single sentence after reading the sentence. At one point, she explained what the word 'corridor' meant.
It was maddening. Every time she did this, I ended up finishing the whole book on my own after school so I could just zone out while she's summarizing every single sentence to the class.
And she'd yell at me for reading ahead of the class 🙃
This is sad, so depressing, but also can be as so many other things are in this world, a great separator, a tie breaker. It’s definitely going on my (imaginary) dating profile: no magibook users please!
Ok so I am a horrible reader, but I can appreciate a "hard book" for adding a lot more feeling into the text. This is some bullshit and I hope copyright holders take note and smack it down.
"avoid difficult language"
Venture capitalists are going to drive toward actual Orwellian speech shit in a way that he believed socialists dreamt of doing.
This sort of idea has been around forever. This was Reader’s Digest. This was the series of pocket-sized classics Dad and I read together in kindergarten and first grade.
Artless, yes. Ray Bradbury specifically warned about it. But the machine part is the creepy fear here.
Comments
But writing them takes skill and it takes sensitivity - both to the original author and to the eventual reader.
AI won’t give us that.
AI is such a misnomer and it's being applied to so much stuff that's just BAD!
"Thus with a kiss I unalive!"
Till he unseamed him from the nave in minecraft
And fixed his head upon our battlements."
But if you want to donate your time to producing bespoke simplifications of classics nobody is stopping you
LLMs are excellent at producing summaries. They're a useful tool
Fucking disgusting. feel like i need a shower.
Gatsby isn't even a hard book!
Right! At least show it utterly fucking up finnegans wake or something.
“I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes”
Becomes
Molly masturbated
embiggening your book looking
But I don’t really trust anything about this because of the everything happening.
"Times were different in a lot of ways."
A Story of Two Places
- Chuck Dick.
I’m learning French, and the last thing i want to do is read a dumbed-down French novel; I’ll read simpler literature and work my way up.
Translation and graphic novels of classics are "evisceration" too?
Frankly, ire shd be reserved for AI rewriting rather than entire concept. Shocked reading simpler versions seen as moral failing.
But some of language in this thread comes across as ableist ("dumbed down", etc.). Just like visually impaired folks arenʻt only ones who use alt-text, learners or cognitively impaired read simpler books based on existing texts.
We should works of appropriate difficulty for those who need them; not destroy someone’s creation to fit.
... these are the same people who go around trying to tell writers about their idea for a book "that only needs someone like you to write it" so you can split the cash 50/50
It’s not just “run it through a blender and reduce it to the most rudimentary elements”
Becomes...
"She was hot!"
I teach reading. I want stories to be more accessible. I get them more accessible by teaching better reading. I know that's not always possible, so I help everyone I can.
#ReadingIsFundamental 📚
Then burn the whole thing down.
My mother asked my father if he had wound up the clock, and he was annoyed.
The horrors, they never cease
Maybe the problem was the US education system all along?
1) Cliff's Notes always have existed.
2) People who used Cliff's Notes and this type of thing were and are uninteresting people, who interesting and good people, have always been able to suss out and not associate with...
3) Those ppl just become boring ass tech bros now
Easy: Should I kill myself?
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-talk-about-books-you-havent-read-9781596917149/
(in keeping with the theme, I haven't read that book)
And instead they went with that line that is incredibly easy to read?
Like how stupid are we going for here?
Call me Bob.
Back then, some things were good and some things were bad.
*weeping*
HOW
Even then when he's being more wordy like this its still part of the character.
Christ, lets see them run this in Finnegan's Wake.
I get books similar to these that are in "français facile" but they are written by a human to try to keep the author's style. For some books, it's more trouble than it's worth. Completely guts the original of why you would read it.
Giving you an entirely different work to read hasn’t made the original and actual work any more accessible
Whether AI is capable of that translation is another matter.
Whereas this just blurs and hides any of that, which isn’t making the original work more accessible it is burying it
that provides condensed versions of popular business books. 250 pgs down to 20 or so. Given how poorly written and repetitive business books can be, the few times I’ve read both I found there wasn’t much value lost. But that’s just cause the originals suck so much.
It’s for people who want the presumed status of having read Literature but on easy mode
Like, if you're going to do this to a book, don't waste your time on it. Watch the movie.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
"I'm Ishmael."
"Rich guys need wives."
I remember the page on "Interview With the Vampire" was just ANGST in giant red font.
Come to think of it... That would be a genuinely interesting experiment and now I want to do it.
Join the 1% :)
Quick, do a pitch for the investor class!
[protagonist(s)]: “I’m gay”
By
F
Man fake. Sad.
"Where's your false God now?"
Easy translation: Sad.
I don't necessarily hate making easier versions of books for people who aren't strong readers yet. I think a lot about Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, adapted in the 1860s for very young kids to learn to read.
Vs
"A Hobbit lived in a comfortable house."
Like sparknotes. I tried to picture someone who could use this, and I think they'll benefit from sparknotes more for understanding prose and text better.
This little tool to have a reader point at things. Uh, huh.
https://www.vtechkids.com/product/detail/21120
The drought of Marche hathe perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich liquor
Of which vertu engendred is the flower
[…]
✅ I went on a trip last spring
Do these people really not understand that?
No wait, they just want all their characters to be the same white dude.
It was my junior year. We were all 16-17.
And she'd yell at me for reading ahead of the class 🙃
Venture capitalists are going to drive toward actual Orwellian speech shit in a way that he believed socialists dreamt of doing.
Nearly all of them profanity.
Artless, yes. Ray Bradbury specifically warned about it. But the machine part is the creepy fear here.
Wow! All the wealth of language distilled to a poor version of nothing interesting at what used to be second grade reading levels. 😡🙃
That's what this says.
(A minor point in the face of the pure horror of this.)