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.
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.
Would it get them to actually read books if what they’re getting is easy-to-read summaries? I would think measuring someone’s reading level and giving them a list of suggestions based on their tastes would work better. They do that for schoolkids, I don’t know why it shouldn’t be done for adults too. No AI necessary.
I’m an adult learner of a foreign language, and I wasn’t able to read for fun until I had finished three semesters of grad school in (and on) the language. Before that, my reading level was so low that kids books for that level weren’t interesting (I was actually really excited to try out the Percy Jackson series, because I missed it the first time in English, but it was way too complicated).
It’s an edge case, I’ll grant you, but I would have loved something like this at that reading level. I would have preferred to pay a real person to do it so as not to lose out on important context and make sure the wording wasn’t weird, but I didn’t find anyone willing to do it
I dont think this really qualifies as a summary, this is re-writing an entire novel in simpler language. There is definitely going to be some meaning and intent lost in that process, but not as much as if it was never read it at all.
I can think of a handful of books that I bounced off of and resorted to looking through the Coles Notes instead.
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.
Were they hardback and had painted covers?
If so, it’s likely I read that Huck Finn 2 dozen times as a kid.
They did! The cardboard was usually white or blue with the artwork on it if my memory serves.
