Fuck AI

People always seem to think I'm kidding when I say I've lost any and all hope for humanity's future. But then I point them to shit like this.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use

-~~ernest hemingway~~ ChatGPT

After getting past the initial horror, I think I'm coming around on this. This is very likely only going to be used by people that wouldn't otherwise read the book.

If this gets more people to actually read books then I'm on board.

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.

"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.

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/

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.

"Look at that sign with a big picture of eyes. It makes me think about stuff."