It was possibly on Reddit, but you can imagine the rhetoric. I actually do think it was on Lemmy. I believe I said that the Oompa-Loompas being literal African Pygmies was a bit much, and could remember feeling that way even as a young child. I think even Mr Dahl himself might have come to the same conclusion in later life.
This is okay for people to change their views, I think it's better to add author's or editor's commentary in such a case, not censor the shit out of the book
So they're ruining the original artistic vision, dumbing down literature despite existing whithin the greatest age of information, all while possibly ruining the original message and meanings of the book. Tech bros need to walk outside, touch grass, feel the warmth of the sun on their skin, and maybe try talking to an actual human for once in their life.
Computer engineer here. I’m similar, spend a lot of my time mucking w/ semiconductors & such at work - I wouldn’t quite say CompEs and EEs are “tech bros” though. Tech savvy? Sure! But tech bros I like to think are the people who are more interested in monetizing tech than actually knowing how to use it.
That said, I most certainly consider myself a demon spawn.
Yep. As much as I know, those of us with the know how aren't actually doing these shitty things, it's always someone else who takes a sledgehammer to a screw.
I guess I closed the tab, so I forget exactly, but something to the effect of “Simplify the following text for a 5 year old” then pasted the parent text inside double quotes.
What if every book was written like "50 Shades of Gray"? Or if every steakhouse only served McDonald's hamburger patties because steak is too complicated for some folks?
I always assumed that tech bros were the client, not the developer. They're the frat bros of the tech world. They don't know or care what a technology does. They're just going to slap it into anything and everything and hype it up like crazy to make that tech bubble money before it inevitably bursts.
Something like this to produce graded readers is a great idea, but I don't see anything in the ad itself that indicates it's for language learners. If this is for a general audience for native speakers, then it's enabling people to avoid learning to read (and ultimately use) more complex and nuanced language, in favor of infantilizing consumers and spoon feeding them everything.
The only use case I could see this being a positive for when aimed at native speakers would be something like adult literacy programs, or maybe homeschooling for kids with difficulties learning to read who don't have the trained, professional support that one would hope they might have in a more typical school setting. For adults who struggle with illiteracy, I could see this being quite beneficial, though. It's something that people will often be embarrassed about to begin with, and somebody who's feeling self-conscious about this could be demotivated by only being able to read books aimed at children. Even if they say "Screw it, I need to do this," it can be difficult to maintain motivation and interest when the only content you can find at your reading level is written for little kids. If they could have adult materials adapted to a level that's challenging but manageable for them, I could certainly see that being a good thing.
They aren't removed because they're too hard, they're removed because they're inconvenient. They are removed when there is a more succinct and/or better understood alternative, for example "evolution" doesn't have a good alternative to replace it. Memorizing relatively obscure words isn't intellectual, and as simple building blocks as possible can often better communicate more complex ideas. There's a reason C is better liked than C++
I love that they picked a book that is 90% nuance and symbolism for a tool that destroys nuance and symbolism...it's like claymation Shakespeare celebrity death match.
"It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”.
Fuck it downvote me for having the wrong opinion but I am okay with this existing. Looking at the full feature list it has additional vocabulary learning tools and the reading level is scalable which might make this a hugely helpful tool for new or very young language learners.
CliffsNotes already exists, yes, but summaries are different from paraphrasing, and it is very hit or miss with the accuracy of its summaries which usually have terrible grammar and writing quality anyway, making it awful for most English learners’ applications.
I don't have a problem with simplified versions of texts -- archaic language, ornamented prose, and obsolete cultural references shouldn't stand in the way of someone having access to the ideas contained in great literature. But I like it when people do the simplifying--like "Reader's Digest" versions, or Cliff's Notes, or whatever. It's a skilled profession that already doesn't get the credit it deserves, and I worry AI will eclipse human work with voluminous inferior results.
I am with you. Again though as I mentioned the CliffsNotes tend to he very poor in quality, so I feel this tool can act as a supplement to aid in the user’s education if free or low cost tools are all they can afford. :)
Yeah, as fun as it sounds to jump on the bandwagon and shit on this app, I don't hate it. Especially if you actually go to the appstore page and look at the intended audience. Saying "lol git gud n read" is being pretty ableist to like, at least half the groups on that list.
Yeah, the amount of ableism (and classism, racism) in the post and comments is fucking gross.
AI is a tool.
Are capitalists using it for evil? Sure.
Is this specifically an evil use?
Only if your goal is to exclude people who you see as lesser than yourself from accessing information you have the privilege to freely access.
Personally having the knowledge and ability to read books in general, but in what is often outdated (or not even someone's first) language, unaided, doesn't mean everyone does (or that everyone ever will be, even in whatever "perfect" world they like to imagine where people with different needs don't exist), and making literature more accessible will only ever be a positive thing (again, unless someone's goal is to exclude people they see as lesser than them, which evidently many do, in which case, rallying against accessibility aids is right on brand).
People need to get off their high horses and start aiming their anger where it belongs (how about the billionaire owned governments that ensure the population is poorly educated to make us all, yourselves included as is clearly evident here, easier to manipulate, or that exclude those of us with different needs and learning styles and classifies us as "burdens", or the billionaires making billions more from commodifying freely available information), not join hands with oppressors and stomp anyone they consider bellow them.
This is a textbook strawman argument. The foundational premise of this argument is that the only reason someone could have for opposing a tool like this is because of a desire to exclude others from accessing specific works that they believe hold a specific degree of cultural capital, and, as such, anyone who makes an argument against this technology must, therefore, automatically hold this position.
Which is not the case. One argument against this technology is that it at best mangles and at worst destroys the underlying meaning and significance of a work of literature. Your argument seems to consider the form of language of a work of literature as window dressing to it - something with far less meaning or significance than its summarizable content. But for many works of literature, it's not. Some things are written to be difficult. Some things are written to be accessible purely to adults with a complex grasp of the language. Some thing are meant to challenge a reader. That's why every year in school you're assigned slightly harder books - because learning is a process of continually being challenged. And this is a tool that actively seeks to negate that. If you're learning English and you want to read a famously difficult English novel, why reduce its complexity to the point where you're not even reading the actual novel instead of just reading a version translated into your native language? Or get two copies, one in English and one in your native language, side by side and compare the language in each? A good translation by a skilled translator can preserve most, if not all, of the artistic value of the original, as opposed to this, where a huge chunk of the underlying artistic value of the work itself has been drained from it like blood from a slaughtered animal.
As such, the issue is not "wanting to keep the work out of the hands of ESL learners or children." It's about not wanting the underlying work diminished.
I would also argue that this is a tool ripe for exploitation in the worst ways possible, as "simplification" is a stone's throw from censorship. Some group doesn't like the inclusion of LGBT characters in a famous book? Use this AI tool to programmatically erase any mention of them. Some group doesn't like that a book is critical of capitalism? Suddenly, large parts read like a parable straight from the mouth of Supply-Side Jesus. I know, let's cut out all mention of race in Huckleberry Finn. Now it's just a fun story about a kid and his..."friend"...traveling down the Mississippi! And if you were reading a novel in this way for the first time, you probably wouldn't have any idea that this wasn't what the author themselves had written and that you were reading a warped, ideologically twisted homunculus of the original.
Well put. If anything, an aspiring English learner using this tool will likely feel inspired by these stories to the point that they return to them and read them normally later on :)
It is so important to take the artistic out of art. Especially right now when shitgasming AI is spaffing out content with no artistic value whatsoever!
I saw a great comment the other day that someone didn't believe in human souls until they saw what AI "art". The difference between human art and AI garbage made them conclude there was a distinctly human touch necessary.
There is still a wide gap between human consciousness and what they are calling AI. He is comparing a self-aware, thinking being to a program that picks the next thing based on what it has seen a lot of. I am not arguing for human souls, just that he is comparing apples and moon dust.
Our ability to feel and connect with the feelings of others isn't proof of the soul, but to me that ability is as important as any metaphysical endowment
I think many of you are quite unfair to who this might help. As an adult with dyslexia and English as my second language, this would let me have an easier time getting through literature and experience the stories as the are, not how they are written. I get that nuances and details are being lost in the conversation.
But if I still enjoy the greater story, does it really have to matter to you how I or someone else enjoys our reading?
The way the ad is presented makes it look like there's something wrong with the original (❌) and that the mangled version is better (✅), as if it was actually improved.
The tool removed all the subtext from the original by using this very neutral, matter-of-fact language. There is actual information lost there, not just rigmarole. And that's the example they chose to put into the ad.
LLMs will also make shit up or completely misinterpret what's being written, I wouldn't trust it to get through an entire book without grossly misleading the reader or flipping out. They can't parse that much text at once right now so all interpretation of a chunk of text will have only a very broad, short and possibly wrong/irrelevant summary of what came before for context.
I don't even want to know what this would do to something like a Pratchett novel or a textbook.
As far as accessibility tools using machine learning go, wouldn't a text-to-speech reader app be better for dyslexics anyway?
I do not disagree with you. But i think it is up to the individual how they consume their media. And I agree with the pitfalls of LLMs, I just questioned all the super negative views of this that where upvoted when I entered this thread.
And when it comes to audio books and ai voice synthesis, they might be good tools, but does not necessarily achieve simplify the language. And also, i wish I was a better reader, not a better listener.
All fair points, my issue is mostly with how this is advertised and that I would not want to learn anything from an inherently untrustworthy LLM. Would have liked to use something with quick access to both human-made explanations and a built-in dictionary/thesaurus when I was learning English myself.
Then why not just read the summary of the plot on Wikipedia? It's not about the nuances or the details, it's about actually taking the book versus knowing what the plot is about. The voice of the author matters, and if you're not getting that through a rewrite you're not getting the book as written.
Additionally, literature is one of the most effective ways we have of bettering our feel for a language, and expanding our comprehension and ability. This is even more true for second language acquisition.
There was a famous Hungarian interpreter in the 20th Century who claimed reading books was almost all she did to acquire languages. You just skip over the words you don't know, until after seeing it many times you get an "aha!" moment and work out what it means (and if it doesn't come up again then maybe it's just not that important?). She wrote about it in this book.
If you were to rewrite the text to remove the words completely you're depriving yourself from ever being able to improve your language, all the while sapping the colour and joy out from the words.
As for dyslexia, I don't have much experience with that but I do have with ADHD and getting distracted while reading, and have found audiobooks to be indispensable. I find them harder in foreign languages than my native, but that usually means I end up listening at 1x the speed rather than 2,5x the speed. I used to struggle getting through many books since leaving school until I could listen to them.
I just highlighted that there are some people out there that this product might give value. If someone wants to read a paraphrased simplified book, I think that should be fine. :)
If they lose out on nuances it's on them, but maybe it sparks an interest in reading in general if the first tästeps are easier.
My real concern is that AI in its current form is not great at context and continuity. I see it similarly as translating between languages: Google can do a decent job of directly translating a phrase, even adjusting grammar a bit, but it can't tell when it needs to explain or replace an idiom, or which details it definitely needs for symbolism and which can be safely disregarded, or detect when a word is being used in an archaic or unusual way.
So I think this would be a great project for a human with a keen understanding of literature to undertake, but honestly I think an AI paraphrasing without a large amount of editing would would give you a fairly bland and possibly confusing read.
I agree that current ai is not the saving grace some make it out to be. But as a proof of concept, there is nothing wrong with the product presented in the post.
look at the community this was posted in. opinions/votes will be coming in hot and preloaded. If this was 'tech' or something on mander.xyz, sure. but "fuck ai" might be a wee bit slanted.
it is a little weird though for them to post something actually good about AI and then get angry it's doing good. I mean, even Flying Squid is on the hate-train today. Everyone is hating because either they're selfish (like FS) or narrow-minded / prejudiced. It's a shame.
I was all aboard the hate train, because it seems like defacing a work of art. Your points are valid and now I'm thinking it isn't bad after all. This can make those stories more accessible, and it's not like the original was destroyed. If you want to read the original just get it instead of this.
Had to scroll down so far to find ESL. This is a truly excellent tool for a language learner if working as intended. If it were available to create graded reading materials in many different target languages it would be worth its weight in gold.
Ohh, that's an "L" and not an "I". I haven't thought about lambi toilet paper in a really long time
I thought PapP was a play on the word "Pappy". I also have a medical background, so BiPAP is a common term for me. I appreciate the breakdown though
In my head though, I'll probably still be seeing your user name along the lines of "I Am Biphasic Positive Airway Pressure Daddy". It's got a certain 'ring' to it lol
This omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent dude created the universe, the world, the biosphere the angels and humans and then kept punishing them for not living up to his expectations, so he sent a few prophets to set some ground rules, but that did not work...so he impregnated a virgin and told her son, a real stand up guy, to sacrifice himself in order to clean everyone's sins to set a shocking example of the extreme love he expects for the future. The end.
PS: his disciples also sent letters about theology to each other, about practical matters and the end of the world :o)
Yeah, this is fucking bullshit, but it's not like Cliff's notes haven't been a thing for a long time. This is just another way for someone being forced to read something to slack off. No one who actually wants to read the book would ever consider this.
What do you think of the Voice of America broadcasting news in Simplified English?
I'm alright with this sort of thing for use by ESL folks who read at a 4th grade level in English, would like to practice reading in English, but don't want to read a literal children's book.
Is it done by a human who understands what's happening?
Communicating using plain language is a great way to make information more accessible . Having an AI butcher all the meaning in works where every word was carefully chosen as part of the core message is different. Fiction is more than a sequence of events. The words matter.
See at some point this discussion starts to feel kind of up itself. @roscoe@[email protected] casually created a dividing line between "books that are for entertainment" and "real literature" but balked at marking the location of that line. "Don't be obtuse."
I genuinely don't think that line exists. Shakespeare was the Netflix Original of his day, and his day was some 400 years ago. A lot of "real literature" is labeled as such basically on the authority of generations of pretentious twats, at least a few of whom basically think "old = good and new = bad."
We translate works from one language to another all the time, you think the precise nuances always make it through that process? We also adapt novels to film or television as a matter of routine. The original post uses the example of The Great Gatsby, which has at least one film adaptation. Is that a perfect 1 to 1 transfer of the author's intent? Then you have retell
Beyond this, if I understand correctly, this could be used interactively. Say you're using this on an e-reader, you could have the original text in the book, and then have a "what the fuck does that mean" button you can push to get an AI powered simplification if a sentence is too complicated for you or you don't understand a particular idiom or something. I bet there's someone out there who reads English as a second language generally well enough for The Great Gatsby, but doesn't get the colloquialism "turning it over in my mind." Hell, I'm a native English speaker and I could use something like that for a lot of works over 100 years old that use obsolete language I'm not familiar with.
Or...there's this book called Congressional Anecdotes by Paul Boller, who writes in a style that is trying to be more clever than he is. Instead of saying something like "Senator Grug from Montana called Senator Flub from Wyoming an idiot, and that made Senator Flub angry" he instead writes "The esteemed member from the Gold and Silver state referred to his colleague Flub as a man of dubious intelligence. This didn't sit well with the senator from Wyoming in the slightest measure." I got just far enough into that book before giving up on it to recognize when an author on Cracked.com basically plagiarized it for an article. I mentioned it in the comments and the author messaged me like "Hahaha shutthefuckup" That book needs an AI simplification like I need a good night sleep.
The original post uses the example of The Great Gatsby, which has at least one film adaptation. Is that a perfect 1 to 1 transfer of the author's intent?
No, and like almost every movie made from a classic, the one I saw is complete and utter dogshit.
A good translation is done by skilled translators who understand how to keep the substance of the work.
The words are the story telling. The "translated" version in the OP is a completely different story with completely different meaning than the original. The actual sequence of events in a lot of "literature" is not that compelling. The way it's told is why it's compelling.
I'm not balking at communicating what I think the line is, either by trying to define it or by listing some things on one side and some on the other, because it's hard, although it is. I'm not doing it for two main reasons, no one else should give a damn what my line is and I wouldn't want to list a book that I thought was shallow fun when someone else could have related to it in a profound way. I don't want to shit on someone else's experiences.
I think your being dishonest and pretentious when you say the line doesn't exist. Plenty of books I've read lately, and enjoyed enough I'm looking forward to the next things from those authors, are not in the same league as things I would consider art. This is true for all forms of art/media. Jerry Springer is not art like (insert what you think is the best expression of art on the small screen here). Battlefield Earth is not art like (insert whatever you think fits here). Are you seriously going to try and pull some smug insufferable "everything is art" bullshit here?
I never said there is anything wrong with a good translation even though it obviously can't be perfect and something is almost certainly lost. My French is never going to be good enough to read Camus, so I have to settle for a translation.
But that's not how this started. Before you started your "the line doesn't exist", "Shakespeare is overrated", "aren't I just so smart" auto-fellatio session, you defended butchering art with ai in the name of allowing ESL students to read it.
No one who wants anything more than an entertaining read should use this, ESL or otherwise. If you're going to read something with the hope that it's more than just entertainment, you should try to avoid any further opinions or analysis on it, avoid TV or movie adaptions, not read the Cliff's notes, and not use this fucking app. If you're going to use the app, use it for something you don't expect to get anything more than a bit of fun out of. And if you think you'll never have the necessary level of mastery, or just don't want to wait, find a good translation.
Using this app on anything you would consider art is indefensible. I have a hard time believing this is anything more than you being bored and feeling contrary.
Are you seriously going to try and pull some smug insufferable “everything is art” bullshit here?
No, I'm more saying that "art" has no useful or stable definition especially as you are trying to use the word, to contrast "just entertainment" from "real art." I don't believe a line can be meaningfully drawn between those because lots of creative works have found themselves on both sides of that line depending on when they are in time.
Using Shakespeare as an example, he and his actors thought they were making plays that would be enjoyed by the few hundred or maybe few thousand people who would show up to the Globe theatre during the few weeks they were performing a particular play, and then never again. They weren't setting out to make immortal classics for the ages and none of them lived to see that take place. When did Shakespeare's plays become "real art?"
I don't think JRR Tolkien intended people to take The Hobbit as seriously as they do today.
George Lucas didn't think he was making a century-defining masterpiece on the set of Star Wars.
There is nothing preventing a future where massively anachronistic misinterpretations of the shooting scripts for eight episodes of Two And A Half Men become required reading for all teenagers 200 years from now as time transcending, culture defining classics.
On the other hand, what brilliant works are forgotten because they failed to find an audience in their time, or they became a meme and burned out?
The only honest criteria you could present to me for what makes "real art" different from "just entertainment" is the court of public opinion, which is subject to change over time. I live in a world where huge budget movies are based on stories and characters that originated in pulp magazines and penny dreadfuls.
I'm not interested in trying to draw a line between "this is just entertainment, feel free to view this in whatever abridged format you like" and "This is real art, so I demand you undergo whatever effort is necessary to experience it in what I consider to be the original and correct format, I don't care what your priorities are or how much time and effort you can budget to this project." I don't see a functional difference between an individual reading a version of a classic book that has been abridged by AI and watching the relevant episode of Wishbone. There's someone alive today who only knows The Tempest or Cyrano De Bergerac as the version with a Jack Russell terrier in it. Who are you to say "No that's not good enough"?
As long as the original works continue to be available I have no problem with any method of abridging them, and I don't believe any work is above consuming in abridged format for whatever reason especially on accessibility grounds.
Simplified language for learners is great. But I would suggest to learners that they use this on books that are for entertainment and save real literature for after they have the proficiency to enjoy it as it was written.
Sure, they could always reread it unaltered later, but you only get to read something for the first time once.
Ultimately, every individual reader I suppose. But don't be obtuse, when you pick up a book I think you know if it's just a fun read or if you're expecting it to be something more. Either due to a particular person's opinion, or the opinion of society in general.
If someone is reading something they would like to appreciate as art, as opposed to entertainment, I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest they might enjoy it more if they waited until they mastered the language enough to appreciate the prose.
I'm not sure if I said something to offend you or if you just woke up this morning and decided to spend the day being a pedantic twat, but I'll pretend you're being genuine.
I thought being entertained by appreciating art would have gone without saying. But if you're such a sad sack you can't be entertained by art...well, I guess that goes a long way toward explaining your attitude.
I'm not upset, I'm just genuinely confused that you implied that "real literature" and "for entertainment" are separate categories. I always thought of these books as being intended for entertainment, just in an artsier/more intellectual way than Marvel movies and bideo bames. Your comment made me think you thought of them as something for intellectual enrichment rather than enjoyment.
I'm also confused why you interpreted my comment in such a hostile way, but that's another conversation probably not worth turning into an argument.
EDIT: Oh, did you think I was saying they're not for entertainment?
Oops, sorry, I thought I was replying to someone else.
I apologize for coming in so hot. I really do think entertainment and art appreciation ideally go together and didn't need to be explicitly said. I'm not in the habit of choosing to do anything I don't think I could enjoy. Forcing something for intellectual enrichment has it's place for schoolchildren, or if you feel the need for it as an adult, but these days I don't have the bandwidth. Maybe in retirement when there is more time.
Why expand your vocabulary! Who needs to not only communicate more effectively but potentially even expressing more intangible feelings and experiences while communicating.
This is actually a good thing. I know people who don't have the greatest grasp on English and would never try to read books with difficult (or older English) language. An easier to read version of classics could open up a new world for them.
Now I guess believing the AI will do it well is another conversation altogether.
This becomes problematic if young people who might be wise in one of their futures start reading this shit instead of real books. This is already happening due to social media.
That aspect is my concern. A 2020 Gallup study suggested that over half of United States residents lacked English proficiency. While I suppose a tool like this might encourage some to read who might not otherwise, I worry students will use it as a crutch, not pushing themselves to develop their vocabularies and comprehension skills.
Anecdotally, I work in a field that typically requires an advanced education. The proportion of my coworkers that consistently demonstrates basic reading comprehension issues likewise concerns me.
If they read more simple material, they would still improve their reading comprehension. Maybe even more efficiently, if it's still challenging but not overwhelming
Reading things written in old English probably isn't going to improve your literacy, because it's not really the same language. If anything you're going to make it worse when people try using older spellings, grammar conventions, or words that are no longer used. If you actually want to understand and use modern English, maybe start with modern English. If you really wanted to help people read and write, reform spellings and grammar to be more easily understood or pull a Korea and make a whole new much simpler writing system.
I am more talking about all those people forcing kids to read shakespeare some of which are in this comment section. I've seen people here advocating reading old texts to improve English comprehension.
Isn't this already a thing? Like re-writing older vernacular English works in modern English?
But also, Gatsby is hardly old English. The sentence pre "simplifying" is just longer. There's still some people who would enjoy or benefit from that, I suppose. But AI is going to absolutely mangle the tone and the essence of the book in doing so. It's not just a matter of reducing word count, or at that point your book will increasingly become a summary of itself.
Yeah no I can see how that could be the case. In the example though, I'm not sure what vocabulary is from a higher grade reading level. The word "vulnerable"?
There are books that are too hard for me. I get that and I’m comfortable with it. Anything above short story length from James Joyce or William Faulkner is simply beyond my abilities and not enjoyable to me. It is fine; I don’t read them.
(1) I would obviously never in a million years decide that the answer was for someone or some bot with no literary abilities whatsoever to pre-chew it for me and spit it back up into my mouth like a big mama bird, and for me to choke down the resulting product (2) The Great Gatsby is not on that list my man. It has some deeper themes, allegedly, but that’s not a hard fuckin book. I suspect they just chose a “classic” book at random, unaware that the specific one they chose is a pretty easy and enjoyable read, because they have never read it, because they are to a man a bunch of un literary morons and thieves.
The older I get, the less I am interested in a book that will challenge me through being difficult. I'd rather just be entertained or informed. Or hopefully both at the same time.
Tbf, there would be no point in dumbing down (or simplifying) something like Ulysses which is a prime example of a literary work where the form and content are inseparable.
My point is largely based on that I think the LLM is going to do an incredibly poor job of this. Something like the Pearson readers, I think are fine, because they're accomplishing this important thing while (a) preserving the literary merit (b) IDK, something about how this is marketed makes me think it will be aimed at people who should be developing their reading skills but want easier-than-adult-English level for whatever reason, not at places where it actually makes sense and is perfectly reasonable to have an easy-fied version.
My point was that Gatsby is perfectly readable for an adult reading level. If someone's not at that level with English then fine. Can we compromise on the importance of preserving the important elements of the book, if we're going to make a simplified version of it, instead of just having an LLM make a bad job of it and then pass off the result as something that's going to do something for anybody if they read it?
Yes, as everybody else has said, if you could make this produce graded readers you'd be onto a winner, but it would need to be limited to words from a frequency list. If they could get this to work for Chinese I'd be very happy, it would be amazing to be able to dial up the language complexity so you constantly maintained n+1 comprehensible input. The application they're hinting at here is a bit silly though.
Thats actually really good for people who have trouble reading anything above simple language and therefore can make books more accessible. A great way to use AI.
Given that a large portion of society, at least US society, can't comprehend simple concepts - I am willing to dumb the beauty out of some things to help them grow.
Your point is valid and correct - but there might be reasons such a thing might be helpful.
a large portion of society, at least US society, can’t comprehend simple concepts
That's routinely overstated and deliberately misconstrued, often for the purpose of gutting social and economic institutions.
AI is leverage to this end, routinely. A very clumsy, inaccurate, and chinzy tool is inserted between people on the grounds that's they're too thick headed to communicate with one another.
The end result is more confusion, more frustration, and less coherence as people struggle to parse language that's been mangled into a 4th grade reading level.
Oh Ann, you rainbow-infused space unicorn. If we allow this now, what's to stop them from completely rewriting every classic work of fiction to fit their worldview?
I say no re-writing should be allowed. Learn to read, people and learn to love doing it.
Yeah, get that West Side Story bullshit out of here. If you want to learn about Romeo and Juliet, you should read it in the original Shakespeare, preferably in his original hand writing.
If you want to learn about Romeo and Juliet, you should read it in the original Shakespeare, preferably in his original hand writing.
This but unironically?
West Side Story was a real transformation of the work that added in places and subtracted in others.
If you want to learn about R+J, you absolutely should read the original. Better yet, you should see a performance by a professional Shakespeare company.
Don't watch the Spielberg knock off. Don't even settle for the Baz Luhrmann film. Watch the original if you can.
Purely on it's face, it is an incredible piece of artwork. You can enjoy it entirely in it's original form.
Thaaaaat's different, eh? Nobody should be opposed to someone writing new works from scratch, even if they are inspired by something else. People do that all the time and should keep doing that.
I'm just opposed to letting software (controlled by people who don't expose their intentions and pretend it's all automated with the best intentions) re-write either Romeo & Juliet or West Side Story, for any purpose, including to assist people.
West Side Story was made so that a new generation could understand Romeo and Juliet. It did well what this AI is probably going to do poorly. I agree that this is a dumb idea for a service, and I really doubt any of the current AIs will do it the original works any justice when it comes to wordplay, clever phrasing, or other subtle details expert authors put into their works. That doesn't, however, mean that rewriting works to be more accessible isn't a very valid thing to do. Hell, that's what translation does.
I think we can help people who need help without re-writing classic novels. Who are you thinking would be benefited by this? I wonder if I could suggest some other technology or approach which does help them without rewriting an author's works.
firstly, so you hate all Reader's Digest abridged books, then? This isn't a new concept.
As for who, from what everyone else has already written, so I don't have to come up with anything original to defend: non-native English speakers learning the language. People with reading disabilities. Honestly, just spend a little while reading through some of the comments which address your "but I lack imagination and any concept of people different to me" issue. plenty of good answers here.
That’s what cliff notes are for. Explaining the background and context so you can better understand what you’re reading in, say, Hamlet.
Not just simplifying it and removing potentially relevant material.
For example in the example material:
They weren’t just younger. They were more vulnerable. That conveys a lot of meaning. Even the word “more” implies a current vulnerability.
Advice isn’t just something told or conveyed. It’s something given for the benefit of the recipient. I told my child to get milk isn’t the same as giving them advice about drinking milk that’s set out.
Turning over in my mind ever since -> I still think about is the closest it got to being right. Even then, though, turning over conveys a more meditation/consideration than just thinking about something.
All right all right, I get why this is kind of funny and perhaps it's potentially a bad sign for humanity.
But consider an adult who's learning the English language and is still at a basic level. If they want reading practice, they are often stuck with kids books. This would make practice a lot more interesting.
Except the simplified versions are made by humans who can preserve the flavor of the language and the important meanings, unlike this tool which is like replacing the Mona Lisa with text that says "woman sitting".
In English yes. But the less popular the language is, the less materials there are. With this you can take any book and simplify it to your level. Unlike mass-produced books, AI can be very flexible.
Unfortunately that popularity directly translates to the AIs ability to digest and paraphrase a book. LLMs have been trained on what is available in computer text format, which means mostly internet sources. English has an outsized presence on the internet compared the to actual number of native speakers, so there's magnitudes more training data for it than any other language. The models of other languages will be severely limited, if AI companies have spent the resources to train them at all.
There are many AI companies, including those that are based in countries where people communicate in other languages. What you are saying is not an insurmountable problem.
There are SOME uses for this, but I still suspect its just going to fuel the already piss literacy levels in the United States. Albeit, for people learning English as a second language this is a legitimate use-case imo
With the single example provided I’d say it did okay. Obviously in context that may change, but I don’t see this as much different from someone reading cliffs notes or something like blinkist.
On first thought this seems like its such a weird usecase for AI. However, I don't actually think its completely useless, turning more complex books into children's books while maintaining their lessons and ideas is pretty interesting. And that is something that LLMs can realistically also achieve, not just hype bullshit. Getting grade schoolers to read Nietzsche and them actually understanding something, is a very fun thought to me. I don't think this will have any impact on the reading comprehension of teenagers or above. Those that can't handle the original text, aren't going to read the simplified one. But getting young children acquainted with "grown up" books and their topics and ideas could be a good thing. When its not just about the rabbit in the mushroom house etc. It might even encourage the parent to (re)read the book with the child together, one the original and one the simplified version.
Also useful for illiterate persons learning to read, as reading children's books can be uncomfortable for an adult.
Hard: And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs, yayis, and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland’s tay or a dzoupgan of Kaffue mokau an sable or Sikiang sukry or his ale of ferns in trueart pewter and a shinkobread (hamjambo, bana?) for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her togglejoints shuck with goyt and as rash as she’d russ with her peakload of vivers up on her sieve (metauwero rage it swales and rieses) my hardey Hek he’d kast them frome him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sozh, and if he didn’t peg the platteau on her tawe, believe you me, she was safe enough.
"Maximise your reading potential! Avoid difficult words!"
(Why didn't they use "hard" instead of "difficult", I wonder. "Difficult" seems such a long and difficult word for people who are looking to 'maximise their reading potential.')
"Maximise your reading potential" is even worse! "Read more" should suffice. Let's not use negative words either, let's keep it double plus good here... It should be "read more easy words", nothing more nothing less.
Book summary as I vaguely remember any detail of it:
Rich guy with new money did bad things and never got caught until the day he ran over someone.
It was like being rich and driving a Tesla. The only difference was that he didn't have the car in self driving mode because there was no such thing back then.
"Gave me advice" is not equivalent to "told me something", but the rest of it looks about right. The original sounds nicer, but I can also appreciate efficient communication. If they fix the inaccuracies and make it a 1:1 translation, I'm ok with both forms existing.
It even seems like it would be fun to read both versions side by side and compare each passage. Like the thought of long paragraphs that say very little being replaced by single sentences seems hilarious to me. Also the cases where the simple version ends up being longer because harder words can convey more. As long as they don't do that bullshit mentioned above where they don't just simplify the way it's said but also dumb down the content itself.
After getting past the initial horror, I think I'm coming around on this. This is very likely only going to be used by people that wouldn't otherwise read the book.
If this gets more people to actually read books then I'm on board.
My immediate thought was having a simplified book for young readers. When I was around 9 or 10, my grandma had me read simplified versions of classics like Huckleberry Finn. I liked the book enough that I eventually read the actual book when I was at the appropriate age.
When I was in elementary school, my parents would get me abridged versions of great books from Walmart. They were little paperbacks with lots of illustrations. I loved many of them and read them over and over. Then when I got older, I read many of the originals.
I think that some good stories can be retold in many different ways. One telling will be better than another but even an abridged telling can preserve they key pieces and convey them to a different audience.
Edit: consider folk-tales. They don't have a canonical version and so for example we can have Robin Hood in both Water Scott's Ivanhoe and in the Disney movie with the foxes. Or Greek mythology, which can be enjoyed even if you're not reading Hesiod.
Would it get them to actually read books if what they're getting is easy-to-read summaries? I would think measuring someone's reading level and giving them a list of suggestions based on their tastes would work better. They do that for schoolkids, I don't know why it shouldn't be done for adults too. No AI necessary.
I’m an adult learner of a foreign language, and I wasn’t able to read for fun until I had finished three semesters of grad school in (and on) the language. Before that, my reading level was so low that kids books for that level weren’t interesting (I was actually really excited to try out the Percy Jackson series, because I missed it the first time in English, but it was way too complicated).
It’s an edge case, I’ll grant you, but I would have loved something like this at that reading level. I would have preferred to pay a real person to do it so as not to lose out on important context and make sure the wording wasn’t weird, but I didn’t find anyone willing to do it
I dont think this really qualifies as a summary, this is re-writing an entire novel in simpler language. There is definitely going to be some meaning and intent lost in that process, but not as much as if it was never read it at all.
I can think of a handful of books that I bounced off of and resorted to looking through the Coles Notes instead.
I think implying it's the same book is still kind of an issue.
If you've read "Wishbone Presents Gullfur's Travels", you haven't read Gulliver's Travels, and you have some huge blind spots about what the actual work is.
it is an answer. It exemplifies your lack of imagination and logical thinking. It shows how you aren't reading other people's responses to your ignorance, and your distaste to learning about this topic.
Yeah, this is a rare application of LLMs that kinda makes sense. It's essentially just rephrasing text based on statistics. That's what LLMs are good at, and it's pretty low stakes if it gets something wrong.
There's definitely an ick factor, considering all the problems with "AI", like exploiting labor and wasting energy. But this is exactly the sort of things LLMs can do well. Rephrasing things.
Would it be better to just get a human to do this? Yes. They already do with abridged versions and cliff notes. Best case scenario, this service is using LLMs to just make these people's jobs easier (doubtful, I know)
When I was a child, there was a series of books that took classics and gave them a similar treatment. Every other page had an illustration while the "novel" had short sentence summaries. You could read Frankenstein or Huck Finn within an hour if not just minutes. I read dozens of these as a kid. I'm sure I still have them in storage somewhere. I guarantee that they eviscerated any sense of nuance and wordsmithing for a truncated, hollow experience. Reading comprehension is already suffering. "Services" like these do nothing but hasten the death knell.
Language-teaching books such as the Pearson English Readers series have been doing this for decades, and if you are a native speaker of reasonable age, you should not be using these books unless the language is indeed so ancient it needs explanations. However, nobody will be stopping you...
“I’m addicted to reading, which explains how I ended up being a writer.”
“Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.”
I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own.
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
The moment that statement became public is the moment everyone invested with his bullshit should have pulled out. It’s so profoundly stupid, ignorant, and arrogant that everything else he ever said should have been tainted by it
I wouldn't read it, but my native language isn't English and this might have been useful when learning English in my teens.
I read one of the Harry Potter books in English when it came out as it hadn't been translated to my language yet, and i could only understand about half of it. This would've helped me read the book, and practice the vocabulary.
I checked out Ulysses by James Joyce and it just says
"Had brekkie, bit of a walk, wanked off on the beach, got bladdered with a bunch of prozzies while me wife cucked me and back home in time for brekkie again"
Needs an endless repeating loop in there, plus one slang word spelled out in ridiculous furneticccc fashion, otherwise it's just not Joyce. AIs just have no appreciation of great art.
time for brekkie again, bit of a walk, wanked off on the beach, got burrrrrluckesaaaid with a bunch of prozzies while me wife cucked me and back home in
I like this. It's a matter of accessibility for many who are maybe not physically but mentally disabled, they absolutely lack access to lots of books and translating them into Simple English will open up new books and experiences for them.
Yes, most of us love the wordplay and artistry of books that are hard to read. It's a really satisfying feature of language that it can move around so freely and artistically. But that also means that some people are basically gatekept by language from the stories this language tells. These translations don't take away out ability to read the wordy, artsy original, they just enable other people to read the same story in a language better suited for them.
Well...if you're learning English as a foreign language, I can see how this can ease the learning process. It's a useful tool in that case, but afterwards, it's important to read and understand the original text.
The speaker no longer feels they are in a vulnerable age.
The speaker has a more formal relationship with their father.
The "something" is specifically advice.
The advice can change meaning depending on your perspective of it.
While it's great as an introduction to a language, it's NOT the same story. Not to mention, we already have things like SparkNotes from humans who have broken these stories down.
This could be a useful tool for non native speakers. It’s not always easy to understand figurative speak in a foreign language for example. It doesn’t replace the original book. Books shouldn’t be gatekept.
Before I saw the sub, I thought this would be cool if it were done well.
My reasons are:
My dyslexic, ADHD niece who loves to read, this could help her enjoy a classic she wouldn't consider trying, and give her a sense of accomplishment. Instead of being restricted to simpler books.
Students with a different first language. My friends used cheats, coles notes and audiobooks to try to keep up in school. Books written like this would do more to help build literacy.
Yeah. it might have been a reach. There’s a soliloquy about Gatsby’s death: “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
I was relying too heavily on people knowing that moment in the book.
It’s… honestly haunting when you read it in the context of the novel. My arm hairs are standing on end just revisiting it. The narrator, Nick, might sound cordially distanced, but he's emotionally rocked by all of this. They were really great about understating psychological trauma back in the day.
This is a tool, and I know I’m gonna get hate for this, BUT!
This is super useful in a secondary classroom. Let’s say you have a class that’s going to read The Outsiders. In an 8th grade class you will have reading levels ranging from 2nd grade to 12th grade. This allows the entire class to have discussions about the book regardless of the strength of their ability to read.
It could be a tool used for that discussion. Assign everyone both versions. Then discuss the ways the simplified version falls short of the original (and, because teens rebel, the ways it's better) so that by the time you're done, the kids who struggled to read the original will get more than the easy one could give them (and have really bad errors repaired) while the easy readers will have honed the ability to break down complex concepts. The middle kids will get a bit of both. And there's bound to be examples of the way words change meaning over time.
Sounds to me like it will get a lot of kids reading only the easy version even if they're capable of more. You're basically giving them the cliffnotes.
Yeah, I did, I'm just saying that unless you have a class of diligent students (in which case good on ya,) a good chunk of them will choose to ignore it and just read the easy version. It's hard enough to get kids to read what's assigned, it'll be harder to get them to read two versions of the same thing.
This could help people learning any language, but people with an irrational hatred would rather have a knee-jerk reaction than think critically. They think this will make people stupid when they're already so stupid that they can't see actual use-cases.
I think people are just annoyed about the AI being used, especially when it's literally replacing the beautiful language used with simple tldr but the language is only part of the art piece, and usually the hardest one to digest if you have problems with reading.
Lord of the rings is amazing book for so many reasons, and if someone took a shortcut (skipped the songs or watched a movie) to learn the story I'd be happy for them - the story, the characters, the world are already absolute beauty even before considering how Tolkien told the story.
It's irrelevant that AI is being used. Books being summed up has already existed for many years as Sparknotes. This advent hasn't stopped people from enjoying great books.
There are lots of good reasons to hate on AI - like the fact that it's increasingly being used in a military capacity. This just isn't one of those reasons.
If it actually has quality output this could be great for jargon filled non fiction works that are impenetrably dense for people outside of the field, like in law or science.
Didn't J.K. Rowling do this with Harry Potter? She wrote the first book with simple words and slowly upped the difficulty every installment. Being a teacher for developmentally disabled kids, she knew that some of the books they were being forced to read were like throwing new swimmers into the deepend.
It's no bad thing per se. The amount of information increases and the original still exists. One of the joys of reading is that as you get better at it you can read more sophisticated texts. You won't need this weak sauce AI pap after a while.
I feel like a lot of books I have read are overdone in word count with no added poetic beauty or anything along those lines. The only result of just making it a pain in the ass to read, especially for anyone with difficulties like where you lose your place, read several pages and remember none of it, etc.
I haven't read this book but I can say that this excerpt at least does not read like one of those to me.
Yeah. The axis of “powerful writing vs waste of time” is for some reason not really related to the axis of “hard to read vs easy to read”.
“The Great Gatsby” is actually a really good example of the powerful + easy to read corner of the chart. I suspect that they chose it having no idea what they’re talking about, and that doesn’t give me a lot of faith that they will be able to tackle the extremely difficult task of getting an LLM to not completely ruin the artistic merit of what comes out of it, regardless of how much easier to read it made it.
If The Great Gatsby is a difficult book, what is something like Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses? Actually, I am kind of interested in how AI would destroy those works.
Reading one page a month over 20-some years, I couldn't tell you very much about the plot. What you're really getting, sitting down for an hour and reading one page, is just really diving into the details of that specific moment.
if the lens you view novels through is art then this will upset you. If the lens you’re viewing them through is as information that is to be ingested, this will do just fine.
Books are allowed to be verbose and take risks in language, but I’d argue that in transferable information it’s inefficient.
I'm not a native speaker. For books where the authors use words anyone else is hardly using, this can be really helpful. But not in this example. However even a simple book like this one can be shortened, which some people can find useful. I see no harm.
I don't know if you've read The Great Gatsby, but it's full of symbolism and social commentary and also very much about The Lost Generation and dealing with the trauma of the First World War and I seriously doubt that would be able to be communicated effectively with the Dr. Seuss version.
Again, there is no way I could see that simplifying that book would be able to express its themes properly. What is the point of simplifying it? Just read a different book.
I actually really like this, flowery language is used to "I'm 14 and this is deep"-ify simple concepts. Language is for communication, I wish it was used that way more.
the literary equivalent of:
That was the sanitisation of Roald Dahl's books, which already happened and was likely celebrated on Lemmy.
You're just straw manning without the commitment.
I'm gardening, what are you talking about.
Could you maybe give some links for the ones who didn't get what you're writing about, like I did?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/books/roald-dahl-books-changes.html
https://bookriot.com/roald-dahl-books-sanitized/
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/roald-dahl-publisher-release-original-versions-after-backlash-2023-02-24/
Yeah, those edits were idiotic, all right, thanks for sharing
But I was more keen to see who celebrated those. Although, I am sure such people probably exist not only in the Dahl Estate
It was possibly on Reddit, but you can imagine the rhetoric. I actually do think it was on Lemmy. I believe I said that the Oompa-Loompas being literal African Pygmies was a bit much, and could remember feeling that way even as a young child. I think even Mr Dahl himself might have come to the same conclusion in later life.
This is okay for people to change their views, I think it's better to add author's or editor's commentary in such a case, not censor the shit out of the book
So they're ruining the original artistic vision, dumbing down literature despite existing whithin the greatest age of information, all while possibly ruining the original message and meanings of the book. Tech bros need to walk outside, touch grass, feel the warmth of the sun on their skin, and maybe try talking to an actual human for once in their life.
I'm proud of my demon spawn
She's a tech savvy electrical engineer who spends her working hours mucking about with semiconductors.
When she's not at work, which seems to be pretty much all day every day, she's out on remote hiking trails with primitive camping gear.
From this old man's perspective, she's living the ideal balanced life.
Computer engineer here. I’m similar, spend a lot of my time mucking w/ semiconductors & such at work - I wouldn’t quite say CompEs and EEs are “tech bros” though. Tech savvy? Sure! But tech bros I like to think are the people who are more interested in monetizing tech than actually knowing how to use it.
That said, I most certainly consider myself a demon spawn.
Yep. As much as I know, those of us with the know how aren't actually doing these shitty things, it's always someone else who takes a sledgehammer to a screw.
I dunno - if A.I. is suggesting tech bros launch themselves into the sun, I could maybe get behind it.
But if tech bros launched themselves into the sun we would loose.... Uhhhh... Genuinely I can't think of anything they contribute to society
We would irrevocably lose quite some amount of rocket fuel and metal, for sure
hey dude, what is the prompt
I guess I closed the tab, so I forget exactly, but something to the effect of “Simplify the following text for a 5 year old” then pasted the parent text inside double quotes.
Not reading that essay
Found the apps target audience. Assuming that wasn't satirical.
Ah you never know. Turns out I'm both being satirical and a certified moron
Schrödinger's commenter
Well, Magibook is here for you:
What if every book was written like "50 Shades of Gray"? Or if every steakhouse only served McDonald's hamburger patties because steak is too complicated for some folks?
Thanks, will have a wank in a McD since that's what you suggest
(I like your dumbed down version)
if understanding one sentence is difficult for you etc
The amount of adults for whom the internet is just looking to an endless stream of funny pictures is astonishingly high.
If while reading that sentence you're missing the tongue placed firmly in a cheek maybe consider...
Looks like we found the target audience for that app!
no.
It’s not the tech bros. It’s clients asking for this shit. Tech can do anything and as it progresses it will continue to be able to do anything .
It’s the Clients misusing $$ has and always been the real devil here.
I always assumed that tech bros were the client, not the developer. They're the frat bros of the tech world. They don't know or care what a technology does. They're just going to slap it into anything and everything and hype it up like crazy to make that tech bubble money before it inevitably bursts.
Or alternatively get walled off in their own part of the internet where they can only harm themselves.
Here we come Newspeak and Doublethink!
Big brother is always watching
But that's not the great Gatsby that's the ok Gatsby
Wow it’s like they’re actively trying to make people dumber and not even hiding it anymore
You don't needs smarts anymore. We have calculators and AI.
Tools exist for a reason. I've done signal processing by hand, it sucks.
hipster engineering -
"Man I'm just saying, committing the Laplace tables to memory and working with a slide rule just hits different."
Calculators are no replacement for smarts. They just take away the parts that don't need actual thinking.
How is learning a new language being dumber? This is awesome.
Something like this to produce graded readers is a great idea, but I don't see anything in the ad itself that indicates it's for language learners. If this is for a general audience for native speakers, then it's enabling people to avoid learning to read (and ultimately use) more complex and nuanced language, in favor of infantilizing consumers and spoon feeding them everything.
The only use case I could see this being a positive for when aimed at native speakers would be something like adult literacy programs, or maybe homeschooling for kids with difficulties learning to read who don't have the trained, professional support that one would hope they might have in a more typical school setting. For adults who struggle with illiteracy, I could see this being quite beneficial, though. It's something that people will often be embarrassed about to begin with, and somebody who's feeling self-conscious about this could be demotivated by only being able to read books aimed at children. Even if they say "Screw it, I need to do this," it can be difficult to maintain motivation and interest when the only content you can find at your reading level is written for little kids. If they could have adult materials adapted to a level that's challenging but manageable for them, I could certainly see that being a good thing.
language evolving doesn't make people dumber
It does if that “evolution” consists of removing large or complex words simply because they’re “too hard”
They aren't removed because they're too hard, they're removed because they're inconvenient. They are removed when there is a more succinct and/or better understood alternative, for example "evolution" doesn't have a good alternative to replace it. Memorizing relatively obscure words isn't intellectual, and as simple building blocks as possible can often better communicate more complex ideas. There's a reason C is better liked than C++
Reduce teen literacy levels with this one easy step!!! Teachers hate it!!!
I love that they picked a book that is 90% nuance and symbolism for a tool that destroys nuance and symbolism...it's like claymation Shakespeare celebrity death match.
That was a "hard book"? I fear for future of humanity.
"It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”.
Becomes.... "Things were confusing"
Old enough to remember when you'd just get the Cliff's Notes or read the Great Illustrated Classics version.
But now you can have a computer give you an even shallower and less coherent version of the book.
"The highs were high and the lows were low. Specifically for the two cities and the people in them that this novel is about."
Turn HARD books into EASY books by learning what words mean!
Fuck it downvote me for having the wrong opinion but I am okay with this existing. Looking at the full feature list it has additional vocabulary learning tools and the reading level is scalable which might make this a hugely helpful tool for new or very young language learners.
CliffsNotes already exists, yes, but summaries are different from paraphrasing, and it is very hit or miss with the accuracy of its summaries which usually have terrible grammar and writing quality anyway, making it awful for most English learners’ applications.
Don’t like it? Don’t download it.
I don't have a problem with simplified versions of texts -- archaic language, ornamented prose, and obsolete cultural references shouldn't stand in the way of someone having access to the ideas contained in great literature. But I like it when people do the simplifying--like "Reader's Digest" versions, or Cliff's Notes, or whatever. It's a skilled profession that already doesn't get the credit it deserves, and I worry AI will eclipse human work with voluminous inferior results.
I am with you. Again though as I mentioned the CliffsNotes tend to he very poor in quality, so I feel this tool can act as a supplement to aid in the user’s education if free or low cost tools are all they can afford. :)
It's fine for nonfiction, but I don't see much point for contemporary fiction books. If it's not on your level, just something easier
I see what you mean, but sometimes you want a particular story, not just something on your level.
Yeah, as fun as it sounds to jump on the bandwagon and shit on this app, I don't hate it. Especially if you actually go to the appstore page and look at the intended audience. Saying "lol git gud n read" is being pretty ableist to like, at least half the groups on that list.
Yeah, the amount of ableism (and classism, racism) in the post and comments is fucking gross.
AI is a tool.
Are capitalists using it for evil? Sure.
Is this specifically an evil use?
Only if your goal is to exclude people who you see as lesser than yourself from accessing information you have the privilege to freely access.
Personally having the knowledge and ability to read books in general, but in what is often outdated (or not even someone's first) language, unaided, doesn't mean everyone does (or that everyone ever will be, even in whatever "perfect" world they like to imagine where people with different needs don't exist), and making literature more accessible will only ever be a positive thing (again, unless someone's goal is to exclude people they see as lesser than them, which evidently many do, in which case, rallying against accessibility aids is right on brand).
People need to get off their high horses and start aiming their anger where it belongs (how about the billionaire owned governments that ensure the population is poorly educated to make us all, yourselves included as is clearly evident here, easier to manipulate, or that exclude those of us with different needs and learning styles and classifies us as "burdens", or the billionaires making billions more from commodifying freely available information), not join hands with oppressors and stomp anyone they consider bellow them.
This is a textbook strawman argument. The foundational premise of this argument is that the only reason someone could have for opposing a tool like this is because of a desire to exclude others from accessing specific works that they believe hold a specific degree of cultural capital, and, as such, anyone who makes an argument against this technology must, therefore, automatically hold this position.
Which is not the case. One argument against this technology is that it at best mangles and at worst destroys the underlying meaning and significance of a work of literature. Your argument seems to consider the form of language of a work of literature as window dressing to it - something with far less meaning or significance than its summarizable content. But for many works of literature, it's not. Some things are written to be difficult. Some things are written to be accessible purely to adults with a complex grasp of the language. Some thing are meant to challenge a reader. That's why every year in school you're assigned slightly harder books - because learning is a process of continually being challenged. And this is a tool that actively seeks to negate that. If you're learning English and you want to read a famously difficult English novel, why reduce its complexity to the point where you're not even reading the actual novel instead of just reading a version translated into your native language? Or get two copies, one in English and one in your native language, side by side and compare the language in each? A good translation by a skilled translator can preserve most, if not all, of the artistic value of the original, as opposed to this, where a huge chunk of the underlying artistic value of the work itself has been drained from it like blood from a slaughtered animal.
As such, the issue is not "wanting to keep the work out of the hands of ESL learners or children." It's about not wanting the underlying work diminished.
I would also argue that this is a tool ripe for exploitation in the worst ways possible, as "simplification" is a stone's throw from censorship. Some group doesn't like the inclusion of LGBT characters in a famous book? Use this AI tool to programmatically erase any mention of them. Some group doesn't like that a book is critical of capitalism? Suddenly, large parts read like a parable straight from the mouth of Supply-Side Jesus. I know, let's cut out all mention of race in Huckleberry Finn. Now it's just a fun story about a kid and his..."friend"...traveling down the Mississippi! And if you were reading a novel in this way for the first time, you probably wouldn't have any idea that this wasn't what the author themselves had written and that you were reading a warped, ideologically twisted homunculus of the original.
Well put. If anything, an aspiring English learner using this tool will likely feel inspired by these stories to the point that they return to them and read them normally later on :)
Right, there are so many different reasons people would find this helpful.
Well said.
Wrong. People getting stupider affects everyone, not just them.
oops you called these people stupid. NEXT!❤️
It is so important to take the artistic out of art. Especially right now when shitgasming AI is spaffing out content with no artistic value whatsoever!
I saw a great comment the other day that someone didn't believe in human souls until they saw what AI "art". The difference between human art and AI garbage made them conclude there was a distinctly human touch necessary.
There is still a wide gap between human consciousness and what they are calling AI. He is comparing a self-aware, thinking being to a program that picks the next thing based on what it has seen a lot of. I am not arguing for human souls, just that he is comparing apples and moon dust.
Our ability to feel and connect with the feelings of others isn't proof of the soul, but to me that ability is as important as any metaphysical endowment
If you take the art out of artistic all you're left with is a stick. But it's missing the letter "k," so it's a broken stick.
I think many of you are quite unfair to who this might help. As an adult with dyslexia and English as my second language, this would let me have an easier time getting through literature and experience the stories as the are, not how they are written. I get that nuances and details are being lost in the conversation.
But if I still enjoy the greater story, does it really have to matter to you how I or someone else enjoys our reading?
The way the ad is presented makes it look like there's something wrong with the original (❌) and that the mangled version is better (✅), as if it was actually improved.
The tool removed all the subtext from the original by using this very neutral, matter-of-fact language. There is actual information lost there, not just rigmarole. And that's the example they chose to put into the ad.
LLMs will also make shit up or completely misinterpret what's being written, I wouldn't trust it to get through an entire book without grossly misleading the reader or flipping out. They can't parse that much text at once right now so all interpretation of a chunk of text will have only a very broad, short and possibly wrong/irrelevant summary of what came before for context.
I don't even want to know what this would do to something like a Pratchett novel or a textbook.
As far as accessibility tools using machine learning go, wouldn't a text-to-speech reader app be better for dyslexics anyway?
I do not disagree with you. But i think it is up to the individual how they consume their media. And I agree with the pitfalls of LLMs, I just questioned all the super negative views of this that where upvoted when I entered this thread.
And when it comes to audio books and ai voice synthesis, they might be good tools, but does not necessarily achieve simplify the language. And also, i wish I was a better reader, not a better listener.
All fair points, my issue is mostly with how this is advertised and that I would not want to learn anything from an inherently untrustworthy LLM. Would have liked to use something with quick access to both human-made explanations and a built-in dictionary/thesaurus when I was learning English myself.
Then why not just read the summary of the plot on Wikipedia? It's not about the nuances or the details, it's about actually taking the book versus knowing what the plot is about. The voice of the author matters, and if you're not getting that through a rewrite you're not getting the book as written.
Additionally, literature is one of the most effective ways we have of bettering our feel for a language, and expanding our comprehension and ability. This is even more true for second language acquisition.
There was a famous Hungarian interpreter in the 20th Century who claimed reading books was almost all she did to acquire languages. You just skip over the words you don't know, until after seeing it many times you get an "aha!" moment and work out what it means (and if it doesn't come up again then maybe it's just not that important?). She wrote about it in this book.
If you were to rewrite the text to remove the words completely you're depriving yourself from ever being able to improve your language, all the while sapping the colour and joy out from the words.
As for dyslexia, I don't have much experience with that but I do have with ADHD and getting distracted while reading, and have found audiobooks to be indispensable. I find them harder in foreign languages than my native, but that usually means I end up listening at 1x the speed rather than 2,5x the speed. I used to struggle getting through many books since leaving school until I could listen to them.
I just highlighted that there are some people out there that this product might give value. If someone wants to read a paraphrased simplified book, I think that should be fine. :)
If they lose out on nuances it's on them, but maybe it sparks an interest in reading in general if the first tästeps are easier.
My real concern is that AI in its current form is not great at context and continuity. I see it similarly as translating between languages: Google can do a decent job of directly translating a phrase, even adjusting grammar a bit, but it can't tell when it needs to explain or replace an idiom, or which details it definitely needs for symbolism and which can be safely disregarded, or detect when a word is being used in an archaic or unusual way.
So I think this would be a great project for a human with a keen understanding of literature to undertake, but honestly I think an AI paraphrasing without a large amount of editing would would give you a fairly bland and possibly confusing read.
I agree that current ai is not the saving grace some make it out to be. But as a proof of concept, there is nothing wrong with the product presented in the post.
look at the community this was posted in. opinions/votes will be coming in hot and preloaded. If this was 'tech' or something on mander.xyz, sure. but "fuck ai" might be a wee bit slanted.
it is a little weird though for them to post something actually good about AI and then get angry it's doing good. I mean, even Flying Squid is on the hate-train today. Everyone is hating because either they're selfish (like FS) or narrow-minded / prejudiced. It's a shame.
"Fuck X" communities are the worst with toxic irrationally. BRB, gonna go start "fuck 'fuck X' communities".
I was all aboard the hate train, because it seems like defacing a work of art. Your points are valid and now I'm thinking it isn't bad after all. This can make those stories more accessible, and it's not like the original was destroyed. If you want to read the original just get it instead of this.
Had to scroll down so far to find ESL. This is a truly excellent tool for a language learner if working as intended. If it were available to create graded reading materials in many different target languages it would be worth its weight in gold.
The context of the next passage is laughably applicable but would it be stripped?
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
Is your username referring to a "BiPAP" and a "Pappy" (like a grandpa)? So like, "I am BiPappy"?
Or maybe even a bisexual grandpa?
Neither, "lambi" is a brand of toilet paper, and "papp" is short for "paper" in my language
Ohh, that's an "L" and not an "I". I haven't thought about lambi toilet paper in a really long time
I thought PapP was a play on the word "Pappy". I also have a medical background, so BiPAP is a common term for me. I appreciate the breakdown though
In my head though, I'll probably still be seeing your user name along the lines of "I Am Biphasic Positive Airway Pressure Daddy". It's got a certain 'ring' to it lol
Running the king james bible through this
This omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent dude created the universe, the world, the biosphere the angels and humans and then kept punishing them for not living up to his expectations, so he sent a few prophets to set some ground rules, but that did not work...so he impregnated a virgin and told her son, a real stand up guy, to sacrifice himself in order to clean everyone's sins to set a shocking example of the extreme love he expects for the future. The end.
PS: his disciples also sent letters about theology to each other, about practical matters and the end of the world :o)
Omg, chat gpt is cool. I always wondered what was in that book.
Bill of rights next
Hi all out and do the Catholic Bible instead lol
Yeah, this is fucking bullshit, but it's not like Cliff's notes haven't been a thing for a long time. This is just another way for someone being forced to read something to slack off. No one who actually wants to read the book would ever consider this.
What do you think of the Voice of America broadcasting news in Simplified English?
I'm alright with this sort of thing for use by ESL folks who read at a 4th grade level in English, would like to practice reading in English, but don't want to read a literal children's book.
Is it done by a human who understands what's happening?
Communicating using plain language is a great way to make information more accessible . Having an AI butcher all the meaning in works where every word was carefully chosen as part of the core message is different. Fiction is more than a sequence of events. The words matter.
See at some point this discussion starts to feel kind of up itself. @roscoe@[email protected] casually created a dividing line between "books that are for entertainment" and "real literature" but balked at marking the location of that line. "Don't be obtuse."
I genuinely don't think that line exists. Shakespeare was the Netflix Original of his day, and his day was some 400 years ago. A lot of "real literature" is labeled as such basically on the authority of generations of pretentious twats, at least a few of whom basically think "old = good and new = bad."
We translate works from one language to another all the time, you think the precise nuances always make it through that process? We also adapt novels to film or television as a matter of routine. The original post uses the example of The Great Gatsby, which has at least one film adaptation. Is that a perfect 1 to 1 transfer of the author's intent? Then you have retell
Beyond this, if I understand correctly, this could be used interactively. Say you're using this on an e-reader, you could have the original text in the book, and then have a "what the fuck does that mean" button you can push to get an AI powered simplification if a sentence is too complicated for you or you don't understand a particular idiom or something. I bet there's someone out there who reads English as a second language generally well enough for The Great Gatsby, but doesn't get the colloquialism "turning it over in my mind." Hell, I'm a native English speaker and I could use something like that for a lot of works over 100 years old that use obsolete language I'm not familiar with.
Or...there's this book called Congressional Anecdotes by Paul Boller, who writes in a style that is trying to be more clever than he is. Instead of saying something like "Senator Grug from Montana called Senator Flub from Wyoming an idiot, and that made Senator Flub angry" he instead writes "The esteemed member from the Gold and Silver state referred to his colleague Flub as a man of dubious intelligence. This didn't sit well with the senator from Wyoming in the slightest measure." I got just far enough into that book before giving up on it to recognize when an author on Cracked.com basically plagiarized it for an article. I mentioned it in the comments and the author messaged me like "Hahaha shutthefuckup" That book needs an AI simplification like I need a good night sleep.
No, and like almost every movie made from a classic, the one I saw is complete and utter dogshit.
A good translation is done by skilled translators who understand how to keep the substance of the work.
The words are the story telling. The "translated" version in the OP is a completely different story with completely different meaning than the original. The actual sequence of events in a lot of "literature" is not that compelling. The way it's told is why it's compelling.
I'm not balking at communicating what I think the line is, either by trying to define it or by listing some things on one side and some on the other, because it's hard, although it is. I'm not doing it for two main reasons, no one else should give a damn what my line is and I wouldn't want to list a book that I thought was shallow fun when someone else could have related to it in a profound way. I don't want to shit on someone else's experiences.
I think your being dishonest and pretentious when you say the line doesn't exist. Plenty of books I've read lately, and enjoyed enough I'm looking forward to the next things from those authors, are not in the same league as things I would consider art. This is true for all forms of art/media. Jerry Springer is not art like (insert what you think is the best expression of art on the small screen here). Battlefield Earth is not art like (insert whatever you think fits here). Are you seriously going to try and pull some smug insufferable "everything is art" bullshit here?
I never said there is anything wrong with a good translation even though it obviously can't be perfect and something is almost certainly lost. My French is never going to be good enough to read Camus, so I have to settle for a translation.
But that's not how this started. Before you started your "the line doesn't exist", "Shakespeare is overrated", "aren't I just so smart" auto-fellatio session, you defended butchering art with ai in the name of allowing ESL students to read it.
No one who wants anything more than an entertaining read should use this, ESL or otherwise. If you're going to read something with the hope that it's more than just entertainment, you should try to avoid any further opinions or analysis on it, avoid TV or movie adaptions, not read the Cliff's notes, and not use this fucking app. If you're going to use the app, use it for something you don't expect to get anything more than a bit of fun out of. And if you think you'll never have the necessary level of mastery, or just don't want to wait, find a good translation.
Using this app on anything you would consider art is indefensible. I have a hard time believing this is anything more than you being bored and feeling contrary.
No, I'm more saying that "art" has no useful or stable definition especially as you are trying to use the word, to contrast "just entertainment" from "real art." I don't believe a line can be meaningfully drawn between those because lots of creative works have found themselves on both sides of that line depending on when they are in time.
Using Shakespeare as an example, he and his actors thought they were making plays that would be enjoyed by the few hundred or maybe few thousand people who would show up to the Globe theatre during the few weeks they were performing a particular play, and then never again. They weren't setting out to make immortal classics for the ages and none of them lived to see that take place. When did Shakespeare's plays become "real art?"
I don't think JRR Tolkien intended people to take The Hobbit as seriously as they do today.
George Lucas didn't think he was making a century-defining masterpiece on the set of Star Wars.
There is nothing preventing a future where massively anachronistic misinterpretations of the shooting scripts for eight episodes of Two And A Half Men become required reading for all teenagers 200 years from now as time transcending, culture defining classics.
On the other hand, what brilliant works are forgotten because they failed to find an audience in their time, or they became a meme and burned out?
The only honest criteria you could present to me for what makes "real art" different from "just entertainment" is the court of public opinion, which is subject to change over time. I live in a world where huge budget movies are based on stories and characters that originated in pulp magazines and penny dreadfuls.
I'm not interested in trying to draw a line between "this is just entertainment, feel free to view this in whatever abridged format you like" and "This is real art, so I demand you undergo whatever effort is necessary to experience it in what I consider to be the original and correct format, I don't care what your priorities are or how much time and effort you can budget to this project." I don't see a functional difference between an individual reading a version of a classic book that has been abridged by AI and watching the relevant episode of Wishbone. There's someone alive today who only knows The Tempest or Cyrano De Bergerac as the version with a Jack Russell terrier in it. Who are you to say "No that's not good enough"?
As long as the original works continue to be available I have no problem with any method of abridging them, and I don't believe any work is above consuming in abridged format for whatever reason especially on accessibility grounds.
Yeah yeah
How about for an encore you tell us how The Godfather is overrated and Sharknado 3 is actually a good film.
You know what both of those films are? Exactly what their creators set out to make.
Simplified language for learners is great. But I would suggest to learners that they use this on books that are for entertainment and save real literature for after they have the proficiency to enjoy it as it was written.
Sure, they could always reread it unaltered later, but you only get to read something for the first time once.
Who is the judge of what "real literature" is?
Ultimately, every individual reader I suppose. But don't be obtuse, when you pick up a book I think you know if it's just a fun read or if you're expecting it to be something more. Either due to a particular person's opinion, or the opinion of society in general.
If someone is reading something they would like to appreciate as art, as opposed to entertainment, I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest they might enjoy it more if they waited until they mastered the language enough to appreciate the prose.
People on the internet, obviously.
It's all real literature, that's what literature means...
These books aren't for entertainment?
I'm not sure if I said something to offend you or if you just woke up this morning and decided to spend the day being a pedantic twat, but I'll pretend you're being genuine.
I thought being entertained by appreciating art would have gone without saying. But if you're such a sad sack you can't be entertained by art...well, I guess that goes a long way toward explaining your attitude.
I'm not upset, I'm just genuinely confused that you implied that "real literature" and "for entertainment" are separate categories. I always thought of these books as being intended for entertainment, just in an artsier/more intellectual way than Marvel movies and bideo bames. Your comment made me think you thought of them as something for intellectual enrichment rather than enjoyment.
I'm also confused why you interpreted my comment in such a hostile way, but that's another conversation probably not worth turning into an argument.
EDIT: Oh, did you think I was saying they're not for entertainment?
Oops, sorry, I thought I was replying to someone else.
I apologize for coming in so hot. I really do think entertainment and art appreciation ideally go together and didn't need to be explicitly said. I'm not in the habit of choosing to do anything I don't think I could enjoy. Forcing something for intellectual enrichment has it's place for schoolchildren, or if you feel the need for it as an adult, but these days I don't have the bandwidth. Maybe in retirement when there is more time.
Ah, no worries. I guess I just have one of those faces. Have a better day.
Why expand your vocabulary! Who needs to not only communicate more effectively but potentially even expressing more intangible feelings and experiences while communicating.
Okay, now do Nietzsche!
no no no, do Ulysses
"Fuck the British, I'm going to prove they're not even the masters of their own language, much less five others."
"Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick” -Kevin Malone
This is actually a good thing. I know people who don't have the greatest grasp on English and would never try to read books with difficult (or older English) language. An easier to read version of classics could open up a new world for them.
Now I guess believing the AI will do it well is another conversation altogether.
This becomes problematic if young people who might be wise in one of their futures start reading this shit instead of real books. This is already happening due to social media.
That aspect is my concern. A 2020 Gallup study suggested that over half of United States residents lacked English proficiency. While I suppose a tool like this might encourage some to read who might not otherwise, I worry students will use it as a crutch, not pushing themselves to develop their vocabularies and comprehension skills.
Anecdotally, I work in a field that typically requires an advanced education. The proportion of my coworkers that consistently demonstrates basic reading comprehension issues likewise concerns me.
Edit: that this post was three down from this one gave me a good laugh: https://lemmy.world/post/17068182
If they read more simple material, they would still improve their reading comprehension. Maybe even more efficiently, if it's still challenging but not overwhelming
You improve reading comprehension (like any skill) by challenging yourself. The AI text would only be a challenge for a brand new English learner.
You can ask the AI for any reading level you want and it will do it
Yes, people reading books would be terrible
Reading things written in old English probably isn't going to improve your literacy, because it's not really the same language. If anything you're going to make it worse when people try using older spellings, grammar conventions, or words that are no longer used. If you actually want to understand and use modern English, maybe start with modern English. If you really wanted to help people read and write, reform spellings and grammar to be more easily understood or pull a Korea and make a whole new much simpler writing system.
Are you talking about some other book? Because the text in the image is extremely normal modern English.
I am more talking about all those people forcing kids to read shakespeare some of which are in this comment section. I've seen people here advocating reading old texts to improve English comprehension.
Isn't this already a thing? Like re-writing older vernacular English works in modern English?
But also, Gatsby is hardly old English. The sentence pre "simplifying" is just longer. There's still some people who would enjoy or benefit from that, I suppose. But AI is going to absolutely mangle the tone and the essence of the book in doing so. It's not just a matter of reducing word count, or at that point your book will increasingly become a summary of itself.
It's a higher grade reading level. It's not just longer, but also harder to understand for teenagers who don't have the same vocabulary as adults
Yeah no I can see how that could be the case. In the example though, I'm not sure what vocabulary is from a higher grade reading level. The word "vulnerable"?
Turning over in my head is an expression that's also part of vocabulary, there's no physical turning, it's a form of speech
AI is a liar... sometimes.
Put your faith in AI - It'll give ya shoes.
Disclaimer: Shoes may both be the same foot, have no sole, and/or no opening for a foot.
There are books that are too hard for me. I get that and I’m comfortable with it. Anything above short story length from James Joyce or William Faulkner is simply beyond my abilities and not enjoyable to me. It is fine; I don’t read them.
(1) I would obviously never in a million years decide that the answer was for someone or some bot with no literary abilities whatsoever to pre-chew it for me and spit it back up into my mouth like a big mama bird, and for me to choke down the resulting product (2) The Great Gatsby is not on that list my man. It has some deeper themes, allegedly, but that’s not a hard fuckin book. I suspect they just chose a “classic” book at random, unaware that the specific one they chose is a pretty easy and enjoyable read, because they have never read it, because they are to a man a bunch of un literary morons and thieves.
The older I get, the less I am interested in a book that will challenge me through being difficult. I'd rather just be entertained or informed. Or hopefully both at the same time.
When I read, I want my thoughts and ideas challenged. Not my reading comprehension.
There's a point where you can't separate reading comprehension from transmission of thought.
Agreed.
Agreed
Lookin at you “Ulysses”
Tbf, there would be no point in dumbing down (or simplifying) something like Ulysses which is a prime example of a literary work where the form and content are inseparable.
For you.
JFC, is it really that hard for some people to see outside of themselves? 🤦♀️
Yeah maybe that's fair
My point is largely based on that I think the LLM is going to do an incredibly poor job of this. Something like the Pearson readers, I think are fine, because they're accomplishing this important thing while (a) preserving the literary merit (b) IDK, something about how this is marketed makes me think it will be aimed at people who should be developing their reading skills but want easier-than-adult-English level for whatever reason, not at places where it actually makes sense and is perfectly reasonable to have an easy-fied version.
My point was that Gatsby is perfectly readable for an adult reading level. If someone's not at that level with English then fine. Can we compromise on the importance of preserving the important elements of the book, if we're going to make a simplified version of it, instead of just having an LLM make a bad job of it and then pass off the result as something that's going to do something for anybody if they read it?
people will get even dumber
Yes, as everybody else has said, if you could make this produce graded readers you'd be onto a winner, but it would need to be limited to words from a frequency list. If they could get this to work for Chinese I'd be very happy, it would be amazing to be able to dial up the language complexity so you constantly maintained n+1 comprehensible input. The application they're hinting at here is a bit silly though.
It's not too hard to automatically grade the reading level of a text, right? At the very least the tools exist for tuning the accuracy easily enough
You can grade it, but rewriting it to fit a limited word and character list would be handy.
Thats actually really good for people who have trouble reading anything above simple language and therefore can make books more accessible. A great way to use AI.
i think ai for accessibility is good actually
Is stripping the beauty out of literature an accessibility improvement?
Feels like you're handing someone a picture of a square and telling them they can't appreciate a real Picasso.
Given that a large portion of society, at least US society, can't comprehend simple concepts - I am willing to dumb the beauty out of some things to help them grow.
Your point is valid and correct - but there might be reasons such a thing might be helpful.
That's routinely overstated and deliberately misconstrued, often for the purpose of gutting social and economic institutions.
AI is leverage to this end, routinely. A very clumsy, inaccurate, and chinzy tool is inserted between people on the grounds that's they're too thick headed to communicate with one another.
The end result is more confusion, more frustration, and less coherence as people struggle to parse language that's been mangled into a 4th grade reading level.
Many people don't appreciate Picasso
Many people don't appreciate Picasso
Oh Ann, you rainbow-infused space unicorn. If we allow this now, what's to stop them from completely rewriting every classic work of fiction to fit their worldview?
I say no re-writing should be allowed. Learn to read, people and learn to love doing it.
Yeah, get that West Side Story bullshit out of here. If you want to learn about Romeo and Juliet, you should read it in the original Shakespeare, preferably in his original hand writing.
This but unironically?
West Side Story was a real transformation of the work that added in places and subtracted in others.
If you want to learn about R+J, you absolutely should read the original. Better yet, you should see a performance by a professional Shakespeare company.
Don't watch the Spielberg knock off. Don't even settle for the Baz Luhrmann film. Watch the original if you can.
Purely on it's face, it is an incredible piece of artwork. You can enjoy it entirely in it's original form.
Thaaaaat's different, eh? Nobody should be opposed to someone writing new works from scratch, even if they are inspired by something else. People do that all the time and should keep doing that.
I'm just opposed to letting software (controlled by people who don't expose their intentions and pretend it's all automated with the best intentions) re-write either Romeo & Juliet or West Side Story, for any purpose, including to assist people.
West Side Story was made so that a new generation could understand Romeo and Juliet. It did well what this AI is probably going to do poorly. I agree that this is a dumb idea for a service, and I really doubt any of the current AIs will do it the original works any justice when it comes to wordplay, clever phrasing, or other subtle details expert authors put into their works. That doesn't, however, mean that rewriting works to be more accessible isn't a very valid thing to do. Hell, that's what translation does.
Wait till someone tells you about translations and language evolution
now say that without sounding ableist.
I think we can help people who need help without re-writing classic novels. Who are you thinking would be benefited by this? I wonder if I could suggest some other technology or approach which does help them without rewriting an author's works.
firstly, so you hate all Reader's Digest abridged books, then? This isn't a new concept.
As for who, from what everyone else has already written, so I don't have to come up with anything original to defend: non-native English speakers learning the language. People with reading disabilities. Honestly, just spend a little while reading through some of the comments which address your "but I lack imagination and any concept of people different to me" issue. plenty of good answers here.
That’s what cliff notes are for. Explaining the background and context so you can better understand what you’re reading in, say, Hamlet.
Not just simplifying it and removing potentially relevant material.
For example in the example material:
They weren’t just younger. They were more vulnerable. That conveys a lot of meaning. Even the word “more” implies a current vulnerability.
Advice isn’t just something told or conveyed. It’s something given for the benefit of the recipient. I told my child to get milk isn’t the same as giving them advice about drinking milk that’s set out.
Turning over in my mind ever since -> I still think about is the closest it got to being right. Even then, though, turning over conveys a more meditation/consideration than just thinking about something.
'Ruminating' might be a good alternative for 'Turning over in my mind ever since'.
A person who uses this isn't going to know that word however. They are looking for simple, not just abbreviated.
It'd probably still need to say "ruminating ever since" to avoid losing sentiment. Ruminating doesn't inherently imply a super long term impact.
How is the first sentence hard? Is the next generation really that dense?
All right all right, I get why this is kind of funny and perhaps it's potentially a bad sign for humanity.
But consider an adult who's learning the English language and is still at a basic level. If they want reading practice, they are often stuck with kids books. This would make practice a lot more interesting.
There are "simplified" books for learners already.
So this is nothing to worry about, then!
Except the simplified versions are made by humans who can preserve the flavor of the language and the important meanings, unlike this tool which is like replacing the Mona Lisa with text that says "woman sitting".
In English yes. But the less popular the language is, the less materials there are. With this you can take any book and simplify it to your level. Unlike mass-produced books, AI can be very flexible.
Unfortunately that popularity directly translates to the AIs ability to digest and paraphrase a book. LLMs have been trained on what is available in computer text format, which means mostly internet sources. English has an outsized presence on the internet compared the to actual number of native speakers, so there's magnitudes more training data for it than any other language. The models of other languages will be severely limited, if AI companies have spent the resources to train them at all.
There are many AI companies, including those that are based in countries where people communicate in other languages. What you are saying is not an insurmountable problem.
Yes it is insurmountable. There is not enough non-english text in the world to be able to train an LLM.
Now, 100% of books and all media is simplified and accessible to anybody who can get access to this tool
There are SOME uses for this, but I still suspect its just going to fuel the already piss literacy levels in the United States. Albeit, for people learning English as a second language this is a legitimate use-case imo
People reading more might actually make them better readers, Even if it's too simple for your standards!
I'm sure people are going to ask the AI "translate this text into a reading level that is just ahead of mine so I still improve"
Why not
Yes, the idea is good, I just don't trust AI to do a good job.
With the single example provided I’d say it did okay. Obviously in context that may change, but I don’t see this as much different from someone reading cliffs notes or something like blinkist.
AIdiocracy
/my kingdom for a serif
but I love shopping at Aldi!
It now reads like a 4th grader
diarrhoeadiaryHey Orwell look, someone finally implemented the newspeak you loved so much in 1984 !
I'm so looking forward to all of my Newspeak translations. Thanks! drinks bleach
On first thought this seems like its such a weird usecase for AI. However, I don't actually think its completely useless, turning more complex books into children's books while maintaining their lessons and ideas is pretty interesting. And that is something that LLMs can realistically also achieve, not just hype bullshit. Getting grade schoolers to read Nietzsche and them actually understanding something, is a very fun thought to me. I don't think this will have any impact on the reading comprehension of teenagers or above. Those that can't handle the original text, aren't going to read the simplified one. But getting young children acquainted with "grown up" books and their topics and ideas could be a good thing. When its not just about the rabbit in the mushroom house etc. It might even encourage the parent to (re)read the book with the child together, one the original and one the simplified version. Also useful for illiterate persons learning to read, as reading children's books can be uncomfortable for an adult.
Now do Finnegans Wake.
Hard: And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs, yayis, and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland’s tay or a dzoupgan of Kaffue mokau an sable or Sikiang sukry or his ale of ferns in trueart pewter and a shinkobread (hamjambo, bana?) for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her togglejoints shuck with goyt and as rash as she’d russ with her peakload of vivers up on her sieve (metauwero rage it swales and rieses) my hardey Hek he’d kast them frome him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sozh, and if he didn’t peg the platteau on her tawe, believe you me, she was safe enough.
Easy: Something something... crash
"Maximise your reading potential! Avoid difficult words!"
(Why didn't they use "hard" instead of "difficult", I wonder. "Difficult" seems such a long and difficult word for people who are looking to 'maximise their reading potential.')
"Maximise your reading potential" is even worse! "Read more" should suffice. Let's not use negative words either, let's keep it double plus good here... It should be "read more easy words", nothing more nothing less.
why waste say lot word when few word do trick
People always seem to think I'm kidding when I say I've lost any and all hope for humanity's future. But then I point them to shit like this.
Double plus ungood
Book summary as I vaguely remember any detail of it:
Rich guy with new money did bad things and never got caught until the day he ran over someone.
It was like being rich and driving a Tesla. The only difference was that he didn't have the car in self driving mode because there was no such thing back then.
"Gave me advice" is not equivalent to "told me something", but the rest of it looks about right. The original sounds nicer, but I can also appreciate efficient communication. If they fix the inaccuracies and make it a 1:1 translation, I'm ok with both forms existing.
It even seems like it would be fun to read both versions side by side and compare each passage. Like the thought of long paragraphs that say very little being replaced by single sentences seems hilarious to me. Also the cases where the simple version ends up being longer because harder words can convey more. As long as they don't do that bullshit mentioned above where they don't just simplify the way it's said but also dumb down the content itself.
After getting past the initial horror, I think I'm coming around on this. This is very likely only going to be used by people that wouldn't otherwise read the book.
If this gets more people to actually read books then I'm on board.
My immediate thought was having a simplified book for young readers. When I was around 9 or 10, my grandma had me read simplified versions of classics like Huckleberry Finn. I liked the book enough that I eventually read the actual book when I was at the appropriate age.
When I was in elementary school, my parents would get me abridged versions of great books from Walmart. They were little paperbacks with lots of illustrations. I loved many of them and read them over and over. Then when I got older, I read many of the originals.
I think that some good stories can be retold in many different ways. One telling will be better than another but even an abridged telling can preserve they key pieces and convey them to a different audience.
Edit: consider folk-tales. They don't have a canonical version and so for example we can have Robin Hood in both Water Scott's Ivanhoe and in the Disney movie with the foxes. Or Greek mythology, which can be enjoyed even if you're not reading Hesiod.
Would it get them to actually read books if what they're getting is easy-to-read summaries? I would think measuring someone's reading level and giving them a list of suggestions based on their tastes would work better. They do that for schoolkids, I don't know why it shouldn't be done for adults too. No AI necessary.
I’m an adult learner of a foreign language, and I wasn’t able to read for fun until I had finished three semesters of grad school in (and on) the language. Before that, my reading level was so low that kids books for that level weren’t interesting (I was actually really excited to try out the Percy Jackson series, because I missed it the first time in English, but it was way too complicated).
It’s an edge case, I’ll grant you, but I would have loved something like this at that reading level. I would have preferred to pay a real person to do it so as not to lose out on important context and make sure the wording wasn’t weird, but I didn’t find anyone willing to do it
I dont think this really qualifies as a summary, this is re-writing an entire novel in simpler language. There is definitely going to be some meaning and intent lost in that process, but not as much as if it was never read it at all.
I can think of a handful of books that I bounced off of and resorted to looking through the Coles Notes instead.
I think implying it's the same book is still kind of an issue.
If you've read "Wishbone Presents Gullfur's Travels", you haven't read Gulliver's Travels, and you have some huge blind spots about what the actual work is.
Okay, but I still don't see how this will get people reading books.
That Library visit was mostly wasted on you, wasn't it?
Insulting me is not an answer.
it is an answer. It exemplifies your lack of imagination and logical thinking. It shows how you aren't reading other people's responses to your ignorance, and your distaste to learning about this topic.
If I lack the ability to think logically, wouldn't that make you the ableist by belittling someone with a debilitating intellectual disability?
Yeah, this is a rare application of LLMs that kinda makes sense. It's essentially just rephrasing text based on statistics. That's what LLMs are good at, and it's pretty low stakes if it gets something wrong.
There's definitely an ick factor, considering all the problems with "AI", like exploiting labor and wasting energy. But this is exactly the sort of things LLMs can do well. Rephrasing things.
Would it be better to just get a human to do this? Yes. They already do with abridged versions and cliff notes. Best case scenario, this service is using LLMs to just make these people's jobs easier (doubtful, I know)
When I was a child, there was a series of books that took classics and gave them a similar treatment. Every other page had an illustration while the "novel" had short sentence summaries. You could read Frankenstein or Huck Finn within an hour if not just minutes. I read dozens of these as a kid. I'm sure I still have them in storage somewhere. I guarantee that they eviscerated any sense of nuance and wordsmithing for a truncated, hollow experience. Reading comprehension is already suffering. "Services" like these do nothing but hasten the death knell.
Were they hardback and had painted covers?
If so, it's likely I read that Huck Finn 2 dozen times as a kid.
They did! The cardboard was usually white or blue with the artwork on it if my memory serves.
Found it! The series is called Great Illustrated Classics. My mom would pick these up along with the latest Goosebumps from the grocery store.
Language-teaching books such as the Pearson English Readers series have been doing this for decades, and if you are a native speaker of reasonable age, you should not be using these books unless the language is indeed so ancient it needs explanations. However, nobody will be stopping you...
“I’m addicted to reading, which explains how I ended up being a writer.”
“Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.”
I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own.
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
https://lithub.com/crypto-nerd-sam-bankman-fried-who-just-lost-16-billion-would-never-read-a-book/
The moment that statement became public is the moment everyone invested with his bullshit should have pulled out. It’s so profoundly stupid, ignorant, and arrogant that everything else he ever said should have been tainted by it
I wouldn't read it, but my native language isn't English and this might have been useful when learning English in my teens.
I read one of the Harry Potter books in English when it came out as it hadn't been translated to my language yet, and i could only understand about half of it. This would've helped me read the book, and practice the vocabulary.
Exactly. Simple language is a thing. And for some people it's actually important.
If you're learning a language or have some form of learning disability, you simply can't understand "real" books.
Hell, there are books in my native language that I can barely read (Kant is about as nice as the name implies).
The real question is: how good is it? If 80% of nuance and details are lost, it may not be of use.
"Look at that sign with a big picture of eyes. It makes me think about stuff."
I checked out Ulysses by James Joyce and it just says
"Had brekkie, bit of a walk, wanked off on the beach, got bladdered with a bunch of prozzies while me wife cucked me and back home in time for brekkie again"
Needs an endless repeating loop in there, plus one slang word spelled out in ridiculous furneticccc fashion, otherwise it's just not Joyce. AIs just have no appreciation of great art.
time for brekkie again, bit of a walk, wanked off on the beach, got burrrrrluckesaaaid with a bunch of prozzies while me wife cucked me and back home in
Now Republicans can read!
I like this. It's a matter of accessibility for many who are maybe not physically but mentally disabled, they absolutely lack access to lots of books and translating them into Simple English will open up new books and experiences for them.
Yes, most of us love the wordplay and artistry of books that are hard to read. It's a really satisfying feature of language that it can move around so freely and artistically. But that also means that some people are basically gatekept by language from the stories this language tells. These translations don't take away out ability to read the wordy, artsy original, they just enable other people to read the same story in a language better suited for them.
When I was a young boy my father took me to a city to see the marching band.
Well...if you're learning English as a foreign language, I can see how this can ease the learning process. It's a useful tool in that case, but afterwards, it's important to read and understand the original text.
If you're learning English as a foreign language, then you shouldn't be reading The Great Gatsby.
tell that to my english teacher! we had to study that book and got to make a literary analysis! (german school btw.)
Content/context lost in the "simplification":
The speaker no longer feels they are in a vulnerable age. The speaker has a more formal relationship with their father. The "something" is specifically advice. The advice can change meaning depending on your perspective of it.
While it's great as an introduction to a language, it's NOT the same story. Not to mention, we already have things like SparkNotes from humans who have broken these stories down.
This could be a useful tool for non native speakers. It’s not always easy to understand figurative speak in a foreign language for example. It doesn’t replace the original book. Books shouldn’t be gatekept.
Before I saw the sub, I thought this would be cool if it were done well. My reasons are:
My dyslexic, ADHD niece who loves to read, this could help her enjoy a classic she wouldn't consider trying, and give her a sense of accomplishment. Instead of being restricted to simpler books.
Students with a different first language. My friends used cheats, coles notes and audiobooks to try to keep up in school. Books written like this would do more to help build literacy.
I think it would be very reasonable to have the original and interpreted text side-by-side. Shakespeare readers have been around for centuries.
Ah, but you see, these examples are about lesser people, that society shouldn't have to consider or provide access for...
(heavy sarcasm on my behalf, but that's the implication of this post and almost all of the replies)
I might actually do this for Moby Dick. Fuck Melville's writing.
That book is my white whale. I've tried 4 or 5 times to read that thing and I've never made it to the part where they start hunting whales.
Try the audiobook, only way I got through it
Some day, but yeah, prolly the only way I'm gonna do it.
I read it as a kid via Great Illustrated Classics, which are adaptations made to be easier to read to get children into classics
e.g. “a damp, drizzly November in my soul” and “bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.” gets paraphrased to, “whenever life got me down.”
Might be a good way to finally read it?
"He must have looked up at the sky - which was kinda different - and then admired his new lawn."
I don't get this reference
Yeah. it might have been a reach. There’s a soliloquy about Gatsby’s death: “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
I was relying too heavily on people knowing that moment in the book.
It’s… honestly haunting when you read it in the context of the novel. My arm hairs are standing on end just revisiting it. The narrator, Nick, might sound cordially distanced, but he's emotionally rocked by all of this. They were really great about understating psychological trauma back in the day.
ITT : Lemmy's luddies find out about about abridged versions of books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abridgement#Abridgement_for_print
This is a tool, and I know I’m gonna get hate for this, BUT!
This is super useful in a secondary classroom. Let’s say you have a class that’s going to read The Outsiders. In an 8th grade class you will have reading levels ranging from 2nd grade to 12th grade. This allows the entire class to have discussions about the book regardless of the strength of their ability to read.
It could be a tool used for that discussion. Assign everyone both versions. Then discuss the ways the simplified version falls short of the original (and, because teens rebel, the ways it's better) so that by the time you're done, the kids who struggled to read the original will get more than the easy one could give them (and have really bad errors repaired) while the easy readers will have honed the ability to break down complex concepts. The middle kids will get a bit of both. And there's bound to be examples of the way words change meaning over time.
Sounds to me like it will get a lot of kids reading only the easy version even if they're capable of more. You're basically giving them the cliffnotes.
Did you not read the word both?
Yeah, I did, I'm just saying that unless you have a class of diligent students (in which case good on ya,) a good chunk of them will choose to ignore it and just read the easy version. It's hard enough to get kids to read what's assigned, it'll be harder to get them to read two versions of the same thing.
I believe they mean "difficult books"
Accessibility app bad haha am I right
"Why would they fuck up a nice staircase by installing an elevator next to it"
Ableism at its finest.
This could help people learning any language, but people with an irrational hatred would rather have a knee-jerk reaction than think critically. They think this will make people stupid when they're already so stupid that they can't see actual use-cases.
I think people are just annoyed about the AI being used, especially when it's literally replacing the beautiful language used with simple tldr but the language is only part of the art piece, and usually the hardest one to digest if you have problems with reading.
Lord of the rings is amazing book for so many reasons, and if someone took a shortcut (skipped the songs or watched a movie) to learn the story I'd be happy for them - the story, the characters, the world are already absolute beauty even before considering how Tolkien told the story.
It's irrelevant that AI is being used. Books being summed up has already existed for many years as Sparknotes. This advent hasn't stopped people from enjoying great books.
There are lots of good reasons to hate on AI - like the fact that it's increasingly being used in a military capacity. This just isn't one of those reasons.
Yeah, I agree
Do Joyce next!
If it actually has quality output this could be great for jargon filled non fiction works that are impenetrably dense for people outside of the field, like in law or science.
Man I could have used this when reading Ulysses in college…
As if dumb people will read once we simplify the language
I give you Harry Potter and 50 Shades as proof that it works.
WTH are the ods of me just having started reading this exact book yesterday ??? I am spooked!!
This sentence sounded way too familiar
You're just now finding out that you're the main character? Congrats!
Coincidence
Very!
Didn't J.K. Rowling do this with Harry Potter? She wrote the first book with simple words and slowly upped the difficulty every installment. Being a teacher for developmentally disabled kids, she knew that some of the books they were being forced to read were like throwing new swimmers into the deepend.
When people judge this, can they please consider those for whom English is not a first language?
So THAT is how MAGA has been seeing the world!
"Alright app, summarize Matthew 5:38-40 for me."
"It is unwise to respond to violence with violence because it may lead to an endless cycle of retaliation."
"Hey, this thing is BROKEN!"
It's no bad thing per se. The amount of information increases and the original still exists. One of the joys of reading is that as you get better at it you can read more sophisticated texts. You won't need this weak sauce AI pap after a while.
I'm according to standardized testing, good at reading. I still prefer direct communication to floweriness
I feel like a lot of books I have read are overdone in word count with no added poetic beauty or anything along those lines. The only result of just making it a pain in the ass to read, especially for anyone with difficulties like where you lose your place, read several pages and remember none of it, etc.
I haven't read this book but I can say that this excerpt at least does not read like one of those to me.
Yeah. The axis of “powerful writing vs waste of time” is for some reason not really related to the axis of “hard to read vs easy to read”.
“The Great Gatsby” is actually a really good example of the powerful + easy to read corner of the chart. I suspect that they chose it having no idea what they’re talking about, and that doesn’t give me a lot of faith that they will be able to tackle the extremely difficult task of getting an LLM to not completely ruin the artistic merit of what comes out of it, regardless of how much easier to read it made it.
If The Great Gatsby is a difficult book, what is something like Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses? Actually, I am kind of interested in how AI would destroy those works.
I love when they invent new problems to sell you the solution.
I would have used the hell out of this in high school for those boring books I don't remember anything about anymore
Ew
I'd like to see the AI have a stroke trying to simplify The Westing Game lmao
Imagine how it’d butcher Finnegan’s Wake:
Which brought us this headline last year:
NPR
if the lens you view novels through is art then this will upset you. If the lens you’re viewing them through is as information that is to be ingested, this will do just fine.
Books are allowed to be verbose and take risks in language, but I’d argue that in transferable information it’s inefficient.
I'm not a native speaker. For books where the authors use words anyone else is hardly using, this can be really helpful. But not in this example. However even a simple book like this one can be shortened, which some people can find useful. I see no harm.
God damn it, that's my favorite fucking novel. I am pissed off at a whole level above this just being bullshit AI.
Don't use it? Let others use it if they feel a need?
Think of your favorite book or movie. Then think about them making a version for babies.
Sounds great! I'll probably never watch it.
A good example would be SciShow kids. I can't watch it. But it's there for people, and I'm okay with that.
I don't know if you've read The Great Gatsby, but it's full of symbolism and social commentary and also very much about The Lost Generation and dealing with the trauma of the First World War and I seriously doubt that would be able to be communicated effectively with the Dr. Seuss version.
I mean, who cares? If someone is having trouble reading the book as it was written, let em read a simple version.
Why does it matter what others read?
So they don't get the symbolism. IDGAF! They're reading!
Again, there is no way I could see that simplifying that book would be able to express its themes properly. What is the point of simplifying it? Just read a different book.
But why do you care? It has literally no affect on your life.
Maybe they love the simplified version and it gets them to read the original later in life.
Why do you care? What do you get from caring about what others read?
and nothing of value would be lost.
Wow, you're so humane! Good thing you're the one virtue policing the Internet. I feel safer already.
Just eat some glass already.
back when i was a teen, i only liked parties, music, drugs, cars, and dicks
I didnt want to spend 100 hours on some book with language from the 1800s.
Why is this a bad thing?
I actually really like this, flowery language is used to "I'm 14 and this is deep"-ify simple concepts. Language is for communication, I wish it was used that way more.