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.
Username checks out.
Not reading that essay
Looks like we found the target audience for that app!
This is about finding "solutions" for stupid people that can then be used to extract information and wealth from them. That's a capitalist problem. Tech bros are merely one flavor of snake oil salesman.
no.
Or alternatively get walled off in their own part of the internet where they can only harm themselves.
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.
I guarantee you, this was not developed by tech bros. Just quick buck opportunists.
Here we come Newspeak and Doublethink!
Big brother is always watching
Wow it’s like they’re actively trying to make people dumber and not even hiding it anymore
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.
But that's not the great Gatsby that's the ok Gatsby
Gatsby the Mid
When you order Gatsby on wish
Barely passable Gatsby.
Reduce teen literacy levels with this one easy step!!! Teachers hate it!!!
I think that’s too short-sighted. I remember reading The Great Gatsby and I didn’t like it, because it was so hard to decipher. That leads to either reading it only superficially or not at all. How does that help teen literacy?
If you want to increase teen literacy, give them something to read that they actually enjoy or care about. High-society of (literally) a hundred years ago doesn’t help.
Part of the point of reading literature is appreciating how authors write books. "Literacy" includes being able to read and understand diverse styles of writing. This seems more like it's geared toward passing standardized tests that require reading comprehension.
How does that help teen literacy?
We shouldn’t be pushing great literature on teens. They lack the life experience to even appreciate it. They mark it down as “read” and then it’s off their list for life. All we do by pushing crap teenagers don’t get and therefore don’t like on teens is to inoculate them from great fiction. Let them read whatever they like.
The timeless stuff doesn’t become apparent as such until one’s thirties anyway.
I hope you're right, because tools like these are going to be used whether we like it or not ha.
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.
Agree agreed but claymation Shakespeare celebrity death match sounds actually very entertaining
I might pay to see that...
Best comment I've read in months.
That was a "hard book"? I fear for future of humanity.
Mate I've taught more than a thousand students and the level of engagement on reading ... Anything ... Is depressingly low.
I asked my students to read a chapter of a book over a term. We would read a section every week and Monday would be a reading group where we would discuss what we read and then present our groups findings. Each section was 10 to 20 pages. About 10% of the student body would read anything.
It made me sad
I was in advanced English classes throughout high school, and even in those most people just read the Cliff Notes and regurgitated them. Meanwhile I read not only the assigned works but also on my own. And those assigned works were almost all things I hated reading.
The worst part was when my teachers saw me reading a book for pleasure they would tell me it wasn't "real" reading because apparently you have to hate what you're reading for it to count.
Tbh I have loved reading my whole life and especially when I was a kid. But every single book I ever had to read for a class was a slog that I could not get motivated for. At least for me, the simple fact that it was assigned reading destroyed my interest, even if it was a book that I would have enjoyed otherwise. I've heard similar stories from many people who never enjoyed reading until they started doing it of their own volition.
For many people, reading is boring. And people have different attention spans and different types of brains.
Some people have internal monologues and some don't.
Some people instantly conjure up rich visuals when given info, some don't.
I suspect many readers who like reading tend to easily create visuals in their minds. I can visualize things but it's not always automatic or detailed and so reading seems like an artform based on older less fun technology.
A lot of times kids are bored and annoyed with all the other subjects going on too. They have to memorize facts that could be easily googled, they have to take tests in different subjects. School was mostly excruciating when I did it and whenever I could i zoned out to give my brain a break from paying attention to boring things.
We should let students take more classes they want. Let science types do more science, let less intellectual kids learn to repair AC units, and let people who love to read be in classes with others like them.
If in my school I had done much harder science classes and more computer classes and less history and literature and other things that i mostly endured to get a good grade, i would have been happier. Also AP and Honors classes mess things up because if you are smart then not taking AP or Honors lowers your GPA and messes up your ability to just choose what you want
And were there no consequences for not doing the assignment?
Well, maybe it's a book that they think someone who is looking to "maximise their reading potential" have heard of and might consider it beneficial to have read. Idk why you wouldn't just watch the movie and lie about reading it at that point, but...well.
"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!
It's not just that. A lot of hard books have bizarre sentence structures that lack clarity. So you are dealing with looking up words every few paragraphs (or skipping meanings) plus bizarre phrases and long confusing sentences.
Sometimes, being bizarre and confusing is the point. In high school, I remember that our English teacher took an entire lesson taking us through a single page of prose. After reading it out loud once, we had no idea what it meant because it was written in a stream-of-consciousness format. He explained to us that the entire page takes place in the time the main character steps off of a curb, and to re-read it with that in mind.
So many thoughts race through the main character's head and get intermixed with real-life details that pop up as she sees them, and it makes for a chaotic mess. After reading it several more times, those details become more apparent, even if they're full of racing, half-formed thoughts. You also get such an intimate understanding of the main character and how her brain works.
You're never going to get that when everything is simplified down to its base components - You miss out on the rest of the flavor.
That is often the beauty of literary masterpieces. They structure sentences in such a way that they carry much more meaning than it appears. Part of reading and enjoying a great book is finding that meaning hidden in the words.
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 said.
Wrong. People getting stupider affects everyone, not just them.
new or very young language learners
oops you called these people stupid. NEXT!❤️
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes, people reading books would be terrible
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.
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.
but that’s not a hard fuckin book
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?
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.
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.
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.
-
AIdiocracy
/my kingdom for a serif
but I love shopping at Aldi!
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.
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
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.
It now reads like a 4th grader
diarrhoeadiaryNow 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
James Joyce was widely regarded as a pretentious ass even back then. Tons of people have done stream of consciousness much better. The only people who should bother with Finnegan are academics. There is literally no substance or point to the story - it is entirely narrative fart sniffing.
It may be pretentious and impenetrable but that doesn't make it bad. There are puns you have to know multiple languages to get, densly layered references, unusual structures and fun wordplay abounds. The word quark came from FW. It's challenging, but fun to read because it's challenging.
I'm not saying git gud, no one should have to read FW. It's kind of uniquely just a joy to read for the sake of enjoying the sounds of words and how they play together. Reading it for the plot or the characters is kind of missing the point, I think.
That's the whole problem with the AI summarizer: it requires you to believe that the only reason to write anything is to communicate some simplistic idea: a command, a moral, or an instruction. But writing isn't just to convey a plot or moral lesson in the least, smallest words possible. Writing is poems and songs, plots and novels, screenplays and anecdotes, slogans and slogs. Writing can just be fun for the sake of words and doesn't have to always convey some easily summarized or quantified concept.
Yo, what? Is the book all written like this?? Kinda badass, but also super challenging to wring meaning from
Pretty much, yes. In fact this bit is on the clearer side compared to most of the text. It's very challenging and one should probably not dive into it unprepared (there are a lot of side literature and guides to accompany it). However it's well worth the effort once you learn how to read it (e.g. the words draw their meanings via how they're sounding in addition to how they're written).
""Occasionally she'd cook meals(?) of fish for him and place on his heartsfoot [hearth's foot? heart's foot, figurative language for joy?] her meddery [???] eggs, sausages, and stainish [burnt/crispy] bacon on toast, and a wishy-washy cup of Greenland tea or soup-can(?) of coffee, milk and sugar, or Si-Kiang sugary [some sort of sweet tea?], or ale of ferns [herbal ale?] in trueart [skillfully crafted] pewter, and a bit of bread "??? ???" to please him and keep his stomach porky, until her (???)knees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her joints shucked [peeled] with gout; and as rash as she'd rush with her peak-load of provisions up on her sieve [???] "(???) rage, it swells and rises", my hardy Hek [Hector?], he'd cast them from him, with a stour [force] of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sorrow, and if he didn't peg it flat on her (tail/head/heel?), believe you me, she was safe enough.""
I don't know what kind of rural Irish hell this comes out of, but some of the words don't even look English. I hated trying to decipher that and I'm sure I wasn't accurate for half of it.
A woman often cooks various meals for a man, but he consistently rejects her efforts despite her persistence, even when she's physically struggling. Still, she remains safe.
Brought to you by ChatGPT 4.0
I'm so looking forward to all of my Newspeak translations. Thanks! drinks bleach
Hey Orwell look, someone finally implemented the newspeak you loved so much in 1984 !
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.
I was thinking it was more of a dumbed down cliff notes. Which I do find sort of saddening. But I could also say that the grapes of wrath as a kids book would at least be interesting. The problem is a lot of the art of books is how they're written. Short concise sentences vs long windy ones, or elegant ones etc. There's a feel to it as much as anything, and studying literature is really very much about understanding that.
I actually do think it will have an impact on reading comprehension because cliff notes also did. A lot of the people who couldn't handle the original text weren't reading it of their own volition. They were reading it for school. And chances are if they used cliff notes, they're likely to use this too.
I’m not sure if you can preserve a book’s “lessons and ideas” in a compressed form, unless you know in advance which lessons and ideas you’re looking to preserve.
This could be useful if the information in the text is what you need, say a reference work or a historical account that you just need the facts from.
It's a hideous mockery of art and creativity to use it on a novel, and completely destroys the author's intent and the artistic impact of any passage. I can only imagine how dull and grey the experience of reading a whole book like this would be; like a meal made of sawdust and glue.
Tbh, no. At least regarding your technical critisisms. Try out a LLM with a large context window. Claude3 is currently the best. Feed it a chapter or 10 of a book and then ask it to write another chapter, about an unrelated topic and it will just do it. No problem. Creative writing/condensing/summarising is one of the strengths of these things, if given enough info in the active context. Just asking for a style doesn't really work, but its also not necessary here. Reproducing akkurate facts however is a big problem, which makes using them dangerous. So the retaining of information would actually have to be manually checked by a human, as LLMs are prone to hallucinations and will make errors or changes to fit the writing style. It can write nice sounding paragraphs about spatial or logical impossibilities any day though. Finally, quality greatly depends on the people feeding the LLM, because low effort will also produce low effort outputs.
And I don't really follow what you mean with your comment of "hideous mockery". The people who can read and understand the original version, will do so and never read the simplified version instead of the original. Only individuals "incapable" of dealing with the original would even interact with the simplified version. Isnt it better if at least part of the authors message can be conveyed, rather than nothing? That person never even touching on the ideas of that book? I am currently writing a SciFi book myself and I would definitely want to personally look over and check the simple version of it. But I would see it more like something in the way of an audio book. Reading doesn't have to be difficult and I would want as many people as possible to have the ability to read my book, regardless of their reading level.
All that said, I am talking about the concept here, the specific implementation of the image above is likely going to be some half assed garbage.
In a better word all grade schoolers would read Nietzche, reading only the good years of his work, when he was only slightly mad from syphillis (1875-1887)
why waste say lot word when few word do trick
Sea World, or See world?
Miyagi?
"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.
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
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use
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ernest hemingwayChatGPTIt’s not about which words get used, from this or that set. It’s about how the words felt when the author was choosing them, and how that’s reflected in how the reader feels reading them. And how when the AI chooses words, there’s nobody feeling them as they go down.
"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.
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.
Wikipedia synopsis is good enough for me.
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.
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 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.
“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
"Look at that sign with a big picture of eyes. It makes me think about stuff."
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.
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
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.)
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?
Before I saw the sub, I thought this would be cool if it were done well. My reasons are:
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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.
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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)
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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.
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.
ITT : Lemmy's luddies find out about about abridged versions of books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abridgement#Abridgement_for_print
I prefer unabridged usually. Though the unabridged Princess Bride is a rare example of the book being better when it's pared down a bit.
Fucking 40 pages of PACKING.
I'm not here to say if abridging is a good or horrendous thing to do.
I'm here to say that "thing that existed is horrendous because it's done by a computer now" is a stupid take. People have been dumbing down, translating and editing existing difficult texts before computers existed.
See also : the zillion versions of any language's version of the bible. Here's a fun thing : they all have slightly different things changed/missing/added/tone shifted.
My parents used to have a load of those Reader's Digest Condensed Editions, with like 4 or 5 books in one.
Never saw either of them read many (I think the only one I bothered with was Patriot Games), but you do look clever if the first thing people see when they come to your house is a load of serious looking red hardback books.
"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.
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.
Do Joyce next!
Somebody's gonna ask it to summarize Finnegan's Wake and the poor AI will go rampant
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.
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.
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!"
When people judge this, can they please consider those for whom English is not a first language?
If a text is out of your reach currently you can get to it later, as your skill in it improves.
When you do this you're just reading a completely different (worse) book.
Man I could have used this when reading Ulysses in college…
I've tried listening to the audiobook because I typically enjoy classical literature but I feel like I need to be a literature major in university to understand sometimes. There's just non-stop references to other literature works within it that I'm not familiar with so I think a lot of what makes it so good is lost on me
Sparknotes and Cliff notes might have existed when you were in college.
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.
Yeah JK Rowling really knows her As and B words and C words
That's decent of her.
How ironic that she would be the one with the mental disability now, life is cruel
Yeah but she’s a person and not an AI so it was a conscious choice on her part all the way. When an AI digests literature, it does so unconsciously.
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!
I'm in Gemany and our English teacher made everybody read Shakespeare, Dickens and more in the original. I estimate at least 1/3 of our class had reached a C1/C2 level of English after 3 years of his class.
I feel like I might like this. I'm an idiot and sometimes struggle to maintain attention reading. So give me a short sentence direct to the point and I'm good to go.
Mean while all my comments are novels with 3rd grade grammar and spelling
I love when they invent new problems to sell you the solution.
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.
I would have used the hell out of this in high school for those boring books I don't remember anything about anymore
Ew
Imagine how it’d butcher Finnegan’s Wake:
Which brought us this headline last year:
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.
Even that one page was a mystery, but some phrases really struck out to me for example 'brewed by arclight' gives a right sketchy feel for moonshine.
I'd like to see the AI have a stroke trying to simplify The Westing Game lmao
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 mean, that's kind of the whole problem. What is the point of ingesting The Great Gatsby if not for its artistry? It's fiction, what information do you get out of it?
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.
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?
Reading can make people smarter. Reading dumbed-down shit probably won't have the same effect. This apps prevents people from expanding their vocabulary.
On a side note. I think we should never force children to read old stuff, we should convince them that it's actually worth while. Forcing it on people will just make them reject books even more. There are so many things to read, let them read something that has their interest, something that has a direct benefit to them if they want. If you care about cars, read about cars. It should be about helping kids discover that reading is fun and rewarding.
I think you have the right idea.
Some people find reading boring, just like some people don't like tennis.
If I had this tool when I was a teen, I could have spent more time partying and less time reading, which never made me happy.
I don't know if I would have wanted to read anything.
You were quite the Gatsby in your younger years
Even though that book was assigned, and I skimmed through the cliff notes, and watched an old movie about the book while high because even the cliff notes were too boring, i don't really get the reference.
Did a character named Gatsby suck a lot of dicks in the book? All i remember was he was a rich old dude who liked someone named daisy and he was a bad driver.
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.
If you are communicating facts and instructions, I agree.
If you are communicating visions, emotions, feelings and other mental images then flowery is exactly what you need.
Imagine how thin lord of the rings would be without flowery words.
If you are communicating visions, emotions, feelings and other mental images then flowery is exactly what you need.
I don't agree, you can be explicit and simple while still communicating complex ideas- but it is a difficult skill. And an emotion is a generally a pretty complex idea.
I do agree that creative writing can be fun (honestly more for the reader than the writer, most of what I write on here was probably more fun for me to write than for anyone to read), but it is still just entertainment and not some sacred art form. I'll cope next time I hear someone describe some as "X gold". No, lithium isn't white gold, it's just an in-demand resource. Just say it's valuable if you want to. Analogizing something to gold isn't creative, it's an overdone trope.
Thankfully it's obvious from your comment that you are deeply familiar with the canonical works of world literature, otherwise one might think that you were denouncing thousands of years of linguistic artistry without any real knowledge or insight into the subject.
one might think that you were denouncing thousands of years of linguistic artistry without any real knowledge or insight into the subject.
Whoever would think that is correct. I don't value "art" as anything higher than other forms of entertainment, and there are trends in some entertainment I don't like. Of course some people is free to like them
