the literary equivalent of:
That was the sanitisation of Roald Dahl’s books, which already happened and was likely celebrated on Lemmy.
likely
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?
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.
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
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
Here we come Newspeak and Doublethink!
Big brother is always watching
But that’s not the great Gatsby that’s the ok Gatsby
Gatsby the Mid
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.
Calculators are no replacement for smarts. They just take away the parts that don’t need actual thinking.
Tools exist for a reason. I’ve done signal processing by hand, it sucks.
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++
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.
Reduce teen literacy levels with this one easy step!!! Teachers hate it!!!
Did you mean “BADDEN YOUNG READNESS CHEAP!”
Brought to you by Brawndo©️*”FU, I’m Brawndoing!”*
double plus ungood reading skills
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.
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.
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.
That was a “hard book”? I fear for future of humanity.
Not everyone likes to spend time reading and especially reading shit with antediluvian language.
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I dont even know what “modern english” means. I feel like this is more book learning stuff that many don’t care about and it’s exactly why we need AI to circumvent all these terms and complexities.
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No, I want specialized linguistic Ph.D people to also understand it, but I think boring teenagers with language that old is unnecessary and pointless.
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People who have IQs less.than 110 are probably wasting time by studying Calculus.
Society uses a huge amount of time and resources to have people educated and it’s bizarre how little specialiization and how much boredom is involved.
Turn HARD books into EASY books by learning what words mean!
"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”
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!
How is the first sentence hard? Is the next generation really that dense?
Cognitive disabilities are a thing. Accommodating for them would be a good thing.
Not that that’s the intended purpose of that AI, probably, but if it can simplify the form without twisting the content*, it could be a great tool to make complex works more approachable. It’s not necessarily a question of “can they understand it” as much as “can they be arsed to read it”. I know plenty of people that just straight up didn’t read one of the books relevant for our finals and just skirted through with guides laying out the things you were supposed to know. The book wasn’t necessarily impossible to understand, but so tedious to dig into they just couldn’t muster the motivation.
I don’t know how many books worth reading for their point remain unread by people who didn’t find the wrapping around that point appealing. Simplification may help them, even if it butchers the artful use of language others enjoy.
*The issue I’m concerned about is that the content may be inadvertently twisted in the process of being parsed and rephrased by an AI with no actual sense for the semantics. Who would notice? Would you have someone proof-read it? What about repeat queries of the same book? Would you assemble a library of simplified books?
At that point you might as well make manually supervised “translations” into simpler language that take care to preserve the point, can be written once and revised when language shifts. You’d still get the benefits, but also be less dependent on an AI doing a good job.
Do Joyce next!
Somebody’s gonna ask it to summarize Finnegan’s Wake and the poor AI will go rampant
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. :)
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.
