the literary equivalent of:

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.

Wow it’s like they’re actively trying to make people dumber and not even hiding it anymore

Reduce teen literacy levels with this one easy step!!! Teachers hate it!!!

But that's not the great Gatsby that's the ok Gatsby

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”. 

Becomes.... "Things were confusing"

That was a "hard book"? I fear for future of humanity.

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 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?

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!

Running the king james bible through this

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.

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!

"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.

Stupid AI bitch couldn’t even make I more smarter

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.

people will get even dumber

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.

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.

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.

AIdiocracy

/my kingdom for a serif

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.

How is the first sentence hard? Is the next generation really that dense?

It now reads like a 4th grader ~~diarrhoea~~ diary

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

I'm so looking forward to all of my Newspeak translations. Thanks! drinks bleach

why waste say lot word when few word do trick

Hey Orwell look, someone finally implemented the newspeak you loved so much in 1984 !

"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.')