- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
Saw this image from @WonderWino in the Random Images thread and wondered if it was real.
Dear reader, it was.
And it is as bad as you might think. Their site proudly brags of "democratizing stories and ideas". Democratizing of course does not mean granting power to the people, but rather altering something to encompass the maximum number of people.
In this case, people who can't - or far more typically wont - read something beyond a low-grade reading ability.
What are the good reasons to read a book and what are the bad?
The good are:
- For enjoyment
- For improvement of one's language skills
- For deeper understanding of a subject, topic or point of view
The bad are:
- To say you have read it
Taking a sophisticated piece of literature and chewing it up to regurgitate a softer pre-digested format of it, like feeding some young animal, negates the improvement of one's language skills. One could suppose you might tune the level of pre-digestion to progressively be less as an on-ramp to reading. But this supposes that there aren't already harder and easier books that one can do this with already and without throwing away the opportunity to fully appreciate a work in its unadulterated form. For a deeper understanding of something? It seems unlikely that one could simplify the language without losing depth or precision. One might think this is easier with more technical works but the reverse might be true as technical works are typically already very precise. And enjoyment? Where is the enjoyment of a book? Well that varies. Some rely less on the sophistication of the writing and more on simple action scenes or plot twists. But then these are the books that are less likely to be altered in the first place. The more utility this tool has for someone, the more likely it is that the work's value resided in the writer's style, vocabulary and word smithing. Can you imagine Tolkien through this thing? "They walked here. They walked there. Black figures rose up and stabbed the pillows. A really big spider bit him!"
The only thing I see this assisting with is the bad reason for reading a book - to enable someone to say "Oh, yes - I've read The Great Gatsby" or "You know, in Wuthering Heights which I'm reading..." And so forth.
There is a parallel use case which would be translation between languages. It would be nice to read classic works of literature from other cultures without having to spend a couple of years learning each necessary language. But that's a different scenario with different costs involved.
"Read any book with comfort". I'm sure that I'm not the only person who thinks this is a bad thing. Welcome to a future where you don't need teeth. The machines will chew your food for you.
Dear reader, it was.
And it is as bad as you might think. Their site proudly brags of "democratizing stories and ideas". Democratizing of course does not mean granting power to the people, but rather altering something to encompass the maximum number of people.
In this case, people who can't - or far more typically wont - read something beyond a low-grade reading ability.
What are the good reasons to read a book and what are the bad?
The good are:
- For enjoyment
- For improvement of one's language skills
- For deeper understanding of a subject, topic or point of view
The bad are:
- To say you have read it
Taking a sophisticated piece of literature and chewing it up to regurgitate a softer pre-digested format of it, like feeding some young animal, negates the improvement of one's language skills. One could suppose you might tune the level of pre-digestion to progressively be less as an on-ramp to reading. But this supposes that there aren't already harder and easier books that one can do this with already and without throwing away the opportunity to fully appreciate a work in its unadulterated form. For a deeper understanding of something? It seems unlikely that one could simplify the language without losing depth or precision. One might think this is easier with more technical works but the reverse might be true as technical works are typically already very precise. And enjoyment? Where is the enjoyment of a book? Well that varies. Some rely less on the sophistication of the writing and more on simple action scenes or plot twists. But then these are the books that are less likely to be altered in the first place. The more utility this tool has for someone, the more likely it is that the work's value resided in the writer's style, vocabulary and word smithing. Can you imagine Tolkien through this thing? "They walked here. They walked there. Black figures rose up and stabbed the pillows. A really big spider bit him!"
The only thing I see this assisting with is the bad reason for reading a book - to enable someone to say "Oh, yes - I've read The Great Gatsby" or "You know, in Wuthering Heights which I'm reading..." And so forth.
There is a parallel use case which would be translation between languages. It would be nice to read classic works of literature from other cultures without having to spend a couple of years learning each necessary language. But that's a different scenario with different costs involved.
"Read any book with comfort". I'm sure that I'm not the only person who thinks this is a bad thing. Welcome to a future where you don't need teeth. The machines will chew your food for you.
