Simplified novels can be great for kids or for people who don’t have an easy time with reading.
But writing them takes skill and it takes sensitivity - both to the original author and to the eventual reader.
AI won’t give us that.
There's also a lot of potential for them to intentionally change the meaning of books. Imagine it spinning Gatsby or Grapes of Wrath into celebrations of capitalism...
Like, this stupid ad is just gladly cheering on the meat-grinderfication of reading as an activity you can do, at all. It's as soulless and all-but-dead as the people it's championed by.
Fucking disgusting. feel like i need a shower.
It's AWFUL! LLMs aren't programmed to be right! They're programmed to give you a response that is SIMILAR to what a right answer would look like!
AI is such a misnomer and it's being applied to so much stuff that's just BAD!
It's not even programmed to give an answer similar to what a correct one might look like. It simply chooses each word based on the probability of what the next one might be based on its dataset.
Even the example changes the meaning. The AI version I’m more likely to assume some upsetting family history than advice. And that’s the thing they picked to show us!
It's called the stories of Wishbone, making classic novels digestible for children with the help of an adorable Jack Russel since 1996. I read a bunch of those as a kid.
Yes! In middle school, I read three different versions of Little Women (as originally written, simplified, and more simplified). It was interesting to see the differences -- but I would NOT trust AI to do it.
This is like automated captions, or translations. Not as good as hand made, but infinitely cheaper, and so infinitely more available. (And available *in parallel* with the original)
But if you want to donate your time to producing bespoke simplifications of classics nobody is stopping you
And occasionally a well simplified version will find a market. But for the other million books published every year we now have a free alternative. Not sure how that's a bad thing.
LLMs are excellent at producing summaries. They're a useful tool
You know Cliff's Notes, abridgements, and Wiki summaries all already exist; humans either were paid to produce them or consciously donated their time. This does nothing new and based on the example, does it worse than humans.
Captions existed before YouTube added automatic captions to everything. Should they not have done that? After all they're pretty bad sometimes
Cliff notes will still be around, and wiki summaries (overwhelmingly written by college educated white men) will still be around.
Human-created simplification of classics already exist!
This is just AI making a lesser version of stuff you can already get.
Here's just one example, but there are many others.
www.greatillustratedclassics.com
I read Great Illustrated Classics as a kid. Doing so helped me understand some references in the world long before I was ready to read the real thing. They didn't stop me from reading great books as I got older.
I do wonder what these "tools" day about the intelligence of the people making them, and of course what they think about our intelligence.
Does the AI set read books, or do they mostly learn from YouTube vids running at 2X?
