Now Republicans can read!
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.
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.
If The Great Gatsby is a difficult book, what is something like Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses? Actually, I am kind of interested in how AI would destroy those works.
"Look at that sign with a big picture of eyes. It makes me think about stuff."
Hey Orwell look, someone finally implemented the newspeak you loved so much in 1984 !
Why expand your vocabulary! Who needs to not only communicate more effectively but potentially even expressing more intangible feelings and experiences while communicating.
I believe they mean "difficult books"
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
ITT : Lemmy's luddies find out about about abridged versions of books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abridgement#Abridgement_for_print
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.
"Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick” -Kevin Malone
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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They weren’t just younger. They were more vulnerable. That conveys a lot of meaning. Even the word “more” implies a current vulnerability.
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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.
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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.
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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.
It now reads like a 4th grader
diarrhoeadiary
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.
“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/
When I was a young boy my father took me to a city to see the marching band.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I love when they invent new problems to sell you the solution.
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'd like to see the AI have a stroke trying to simplify The Westing Game lmao
