The thing with these guys is they view communications media (speech, fiction, film, TV series, drama, you name it) as data transmission and nothing more. The Great Gatsby is a list of events and characters and if you can cut that down to 500 words, you're maximizing something.
It's not just a failure to understand Gatsby (or insert whatever work you want here), it's a failure to understand that there's anything to understand. This level of philistinism is what underpins the entire generative AI phenomenon and these people should not be allowed to write the future.
Writing is also important to reading in some cases - if you're not writing (trying to grapple with difficult things), you're not really reading. I understand that neurodiversity and time make that process much more difficult for people. It's just not avoidable. Ideas - and reading - can be hard!
I'm also trying to imagine how that AI summary would even manage the last two pages of that novel. "Gatsby believed in the green light, future orgies, and arm-stretching. We're on a boat."
And failure to understand that what makes a good story good is that the word choice and structure help the reader to become more immersed in the world the author created. Otherwise it’s just a list of story events.
You know that a lot of people don’t know English as well as you do right? Many are just learning it. Some as a second language, some as a first.
Maybe you think they shouldn’t attempt simplified forms of certain works. But I hope they read whatever tf they want and they enjoy it.
Half of all students report using gen AI to help them with school. Clearly they think it is to their benefit.
Call me all the names you want. My money’s on the young people.
“Help them” in what sense, though: Pass the class, or actually learn? And what are they learning *about literature* if they just read an AI-driven plot summary and not the text itself? In both cases it’s only ‘helping’ if you misconstrue the whole point of the exercise.
That is more a commentary on how shitty our education system is than it is about how actually useful genAi garbage is.
"It makes it easier to summarise and send boilerplate work emails"
Maybe we shouldnt have to make and read those shitty emails then? Why perpetuate garbage with more garbage?
as OP highlights, there *is* real benefit in simplified texts but they are still very carefully crafted by a writer — to preserve the tone, intended meaning, structure and style of the original work.
going ‘any and all second language speakers of English can’t and don’t want read complex texts’ is not the progressive take you think it is. simplified language for bureaucracy - great. carelessly simplified language and imagery for art - missing the point.
If I'm learning French, I don't want a simplified version of La Recherche du Temps Perdu ("He eats a madeline and daydreams about the past, the end"), I want to learn enough French that I can read it properly. If I want to read it without knowing enough French, I can read it in translation.
Of course people can read whatever tf they want, but surely everyone's got better things to do with their lives than read machine extruded grey paste summaries of works of art
* not a machine translation either, because the subtleties of idiom, metaphor, allusion, cultural context, metre etc need human understanding to convey across languages
The point of reading a novel isn't just to find out what happened. For that you can read a precis. The point IS the language.
If you see a Shakespeare play and it is translated into modern language for ease of understanding, you aren't seeing a Shakespeare play.
When I was little, I remember having a collection of super-condensed and simplified versions of classics.
They were awesome. They got me excited about reading. They made it more, not less, likely that I would later read the original works.
And you were, by your own description, a child. I read some abridged classics too, when I was 10 or 11, and it wasn't for lack of ability to read novels, which I'd been doing since 8.
These tools are being marketed to adults. And doing a worse job than a human editor bridging a book for children.
The first book I can remember reading without reading it aloud at the age of probably 6 or 7 was a condensed Count of Monte Cristo which even at that age I knew was a better book than my condensed Heidi
For people reading in a second language, books written specifically for them are more useful than dumbed-down classics. I have lots of books for learners in Welsh, written in simple grammar and including vocab lists. Plus there's an art to writing books for learners that read well.
That’s not how learning a language works. You don’t learn baby language.
If you want to understand the basic plot of Hamlet you can watch The Lion King. If you want to understand grief, nihilism and the human condition you read Hamlet.
It's alright to drop a work in another language until you have the skills to come back and appreciate it. Not everything has to be digestible immediately, and there are great English works at all skill levels, without needing AI shit.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m curious about this common reaction.
What makes you think a prospective reader is at all concerned with what you personally judge to be “alright” about their reading choices?
There is this idea, many people got from school, that one is supposed to read for improvement, read these Great Books and you'll be a better person, etc. And the idea that you're 'supposed to' read these works makes me picture someone thinking it a shameful thing to put down a book...
which is why they think you can just replace characters and settings (like put YOU in the story in YOUR neighborhood!) and it would somehow still be coherent and a better story *for you*
just keep the important 500 words and Mad Libs/RNG the rest, according to them
This is why these folks believe 'plot holes' are the most egregious narrative crime imaginable and 'plot hole' is defined by anything that happens where the audience does not already have full understanding of the contributing factors to the event.
This observation helps to explain the obsession in Hollywood today with the "backstory." The backstory is irrelevant. Many great movies have none. But this obsession has resulted in many young peoples' inability to understand a narrative.
Dr Who was never a modern US show with a "bible" of who and how and why, though there was a threat of turning it that way when the 90s TV Movie was in the works. And that's its strength.
I supposed it depends on whether you're only reading stories set in fictional worlds with very strict "rules", like a lot of fantasy/scifi. Readers who can only deal with that style of writing have always struggled with anything attempting "realism" (however that is defined).
This, and there's an aspect where they think all media is a puzzle to be solved. That's why there are heaps and heaps of silly "fan theories" about everything, most of which are cliche ("All the characters are in limbo!") or insane ("Wendy from The Shining is the crazy one!").
