Simplified novels can be great for kids or for people who don’t have an easy time with reading.
But writing them takes skill and it takes sensitivity - both to the original author and to the eventual reader.
AI won’t give us that.
I’m conflicted because I remember (and loved) Great Illustrated Classics.
But I don’t really trust anything about this because of the everything happening.
It's for people who think a book is only about the bones of the plot
... these are the same people who go around trying to tell writers about their idea for a book "that only needs someone like you to write it" so you can split the cash 50/50
The funny thing here is that the concept of taking classics and simplifying them has existed for a long time, it's just that it was marketed directly at children and not, presumably, grown men who think they need to lit-maxx whatever
"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God."
Becomes...
"She was hot!"
HOLY... Ugh. I get it. Sort of. But the original sentence is just so fucking good.
I teach reading. I want stories to be more accessible. I get them more accessible by teaching better reading. I know that's not always possible, so I help everyone I can.
Culture isn't something to be fed into a meat processor and extruded out by ethically-bankrupt tech companies. The only purpose this serve is to produce a poorly-educated underclass that can be perpetually exploited.
ShrinkLits: Seventy of the World's Towering Classics Cut Down to Size from 1980 did this with great humor, not the dumbing down the above seems intent to enable.
I made the mistake of reading a simplified version of Trollope's Can You Forgive Her after reading the original first. A detailed description of a green drawing room which delimits the family gets stripped down to "The green drawing room was too green." I shut it and took it back to the library.
Honestly torn, i like the idea of accessibility, but also as an author I'm egotistical enough to think my prose, my cadence, my jumble; is often more important than my tale.
For some reason Wikipedia has a 'Simple English' version too, but no other language seems to need a 'simplified' version.
Maybe the problem was the US education system all along?
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
In “The Well of Lost Plots” (the 3rd Thursday Next book), which has what at first glance appears to be a minor subplot about an OS called UltraWord that “fixes” literature, when a piece of poetry receives treatment similar to this Gatsby one, it causes people to recoil against said OS en masse.
Eh,
1) Cliff's Notes always have existed.
2) People who used Cliff's Notes and this type of thing were and are uninteresting people, who interesting and good people, have always been able to suss out and not associate with...
3) Those ppl just become boring ass tech bros now
OK, so everybody is going off on this app. And I understand the knee-jerk reaction, because I had the same one! On reflection, though, looking at the listing for this in the App Store, I get the idea that the intent is not to make books stupider, but to help combat adult illiteracy.
Like. They could have chosen something actually hard like Ulysses.
And instead they went with that line that is incredibly easy to read?
Like how stupid are we going for here?
I see it for people ramping up their reading skill or helping people read. But it's also erasing the beauty of the prose. Depending on who's inputting the text, it could also be a cheap and easy way for the company to get more training data, possibly bending/breaking copyright law?
Every bit of clever wordplay debuffs your reading potential, man! Just Dick & Jane everything to read more and maximize your reading score! More is always better! More is always the answer!
*weeping*
Love the idea of making classics easier to read especially where writing style is drastically different from modern speech pattern. Fucking despise the idea of having an AI decide how to condense and simplify great literature without losing anything in the process.
Nicks...not even that hard of a narrator to read.
Even then when he's being more wordy like this its still part of the character.
Christ, lets see them run this in Finnegan's Wake.
Not that different from corrections made to my essays tbh. I can't say they were all wrong, I'm not an accomplished writer in any field, but still it felt like my style was being denied.
The whole attitude of "I refuse to grow or learn in order to interact with the art, but I will forcibly bring the art down to me" is beyond grotesque. A story isn't just a recitation of events. It's not just the WHAT, it's the HOW! I can't believe we have to say it, but THE WORD CHOICE MATTERS.
Holy cow, you improve your reading proficiency by reading harder books. I didn't stop at Encyclopedia Brown and say okay now everything needs to be exactly at this level.
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well."
I hate that it's AI doing this. It's can't preserve nuance.
I don't necessarily hate making easier versions of books for people who aren't strong readers yet. I think a lot about Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, adapted in the 1860s for very young kids to learn to read.
This is “how can we grow grammerly tech into new markets?” business babble nonsense.
Fuck this shit, no one wants it, it’s all for profit, developed by people who don’t understand the world unless it’s adding zeros to their bank account or followers on their social media. Soulless garbage.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
Vs
"A Hobbit lived in a comfortable house."
I think the person who might use this for language issues might rather just try something than this service.
Like sparknotes. I tried to picture someone who could use this, and I think they'll benefit from sparknotes more for understanding prose and text better.
Curious to see whether if you passed a James Ellroy novel or something with a similar shorthand style into the Prose-Blandifier-2000 it would come back four times as long
❌Whan that Aprille with hir shoures soote
The drought of Marche hathe perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich liquor
Of which vertu engendred is the flower
[…]
✅ I went on a trip last spring
In fairness, it offers the option to dial difficulty up (original text) or down (simple) and is marketed as an aid for young, non-native, or disabled readers—but yeah, on the face of it, that does look pretty dystopian in a “this ain’t Shakespeare” sort of way. I mean, what if it _is_ Shakespeare?
I spend so much time making sure my characters have unique voices, both when they speak and when they think, because it is an important part of how you see their character.
Do these people really not understand that?
No wait, they just want all their characters to be the same white dude.
This is sad, so depressing, but also can be as so many other things are in this world, a great separator, a tie breaker. It’s definitely going on my (imaginary) dating profile: no magibook users please!
Ok so I am a horrible reader, but I can appreciate a "hard book" for adding a lot more feeling into the text. This is some bullshit and I hope copyright holders take note and smack it down.
"avoid difficult language"
Venture capitalists are going to drive toward actual Orwellian speech shit in a way that he believed socialists dreamt of doing.
This sort of idea has been around forever. This was Reader’s Digest. This was the series of pocket-sized classics Dad and I read together in kindergarten and first grade.
Artless, yes. Ray Bradbury specifically warned about it. But the machine part is the creepy fear here.
Missing the point entirely?
Wow! All the wealth of language distilled to a poor version of nothing interesting at what used to be second grade reading levels. 😡🙃
Seems like society is now encouraging stupid fucking zoomers who brag about not being able to read. Yep America and the west are over. Games done. Gen Z is the last generation and they are scum.
In stead of a simplified version of the novel, how about a graphic novel adaption (checked out from the library?). It's probably more accurate then some simplified versions and some folks will find it engaging with beautiful art as part of it.
That's almost a trumpifier. But then it would read.
"When i was young. Although i am still young. I'm the youngest man to ever exist. When i was young my dad Told me... And he was a wonderful dad. Almost so good like me. And he said... Mr. Trump you'll hear the bestest tip in the world"
❌: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
I could see this being a good thing for people with lower reading levels and non-native speakers who want to read but are intimidated by certain books. Everyone learns differently and what matters is the desire to learn.
"Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.... Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume."
ah yes, the first step on my journey to hating the rich. the second was monopoly the game. look, without phonics these kids/adults have dogshit reading skills. let alone reading comprehension (🙄). be happy they're reading. OR they could listen to an audio version? whatever gets the information in
This isn’t new: it’s akin to Cliff’s Notes. A summary for those who have been told to get the story, but doesn’t do anything for someone with interest in reading the actual book.
I’m reminded of the “make Shakespeare easy” book that turned the “But soft! What light through yonder window shines?” speech into just “Juliet is as pretty as a sunrise.”
This was beginner level shit by the time i hit second grade. This is insulting. How is the original difficult to comprehend in the slightest? How have humans gotten this dumb on a global scale?
This is for that certain kind of guy who wants to brag to his friends that he has read all these famous books but doesn’t actually want to read them.
In which case Wikipedia already exists
I prefer the simple version, actually. When Fitzgerald’s improver wrote “boat goes hard af” at the end, I connected with the material in a way I had not before.
They especially showed their ass by saying Gatsby is a “hard” book. Please let’s not live in a world in which any book is treated this way, let alone a book assigned to high school freshman.
The real reason this makes me cry is that shitty cover art
I don't even like the book but the cover art is clearly the best ever done for a piece of literature.
Also, it sounds like taking an interesting book and making it as dull as dry bread. I don't think it'll catch on, because people who like to read won't like the app and people who don't like to read won't care about the app.
(And people w/ reading assignments who don't read will just cheat anyway)
I’m going to naively assume that this is solely for lazy 9th graders (perhaps those who were taught to read in an asinine, unscientifically backed method that has harmed their thinking skills and made reading unbearable for them, something I only just learned about and feel equally as sad over 😔)
I bet the tech bros funding this are the most boring, vapidly empty vessels at parties. No hobbies, not well-read, no curiosity about the world. Just "BRO, MONEY BRO, AI IS THE FUTURE BRO, BRO" until cocaine completely fills the void where their frontal cortex should have been
The strategy for replacing (paid) human artists with "AI" isn't to develop AI sophisticated enough to rival human creativity, it's to lower our expectations and comprehension of creative works until whatever AI generates seems good enough
The example being a first person narrative pretty much shows how much it stripped away the personality. It also removes quite a few words that might help to further contextualize the text within the narrative.
