Fuck AI

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.

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.