1118
Fuck up a book for me please
(lemmy.world)
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
Having on-hand knowledge of a lot of dated, obscure, or specialized language does not, in fact, make you smarter
Sincerily, someone who knows a lot of obscure, dated, and specialized language ((i am a linguist))
i'm more worried about people dumbing down non-dated, modern language, out of pure laziness
People have been complaining about laziness in language and "dumbing down" language since language has existed. It's nothing new and it's not happening at a different rate than before. The perceived degredation of language is not, and has never been, a real thing. It's natural and unstoppable language change. It's the reason you can't understand Old English, and why Hindi, German, Spanish, and Russian are different languages from English now.
That being said, things like this theoretically could help to increase literacy rates significantly in populations with low literacy (in a similar way Simplified Chinese script along with Chinese education reforms drastically improved China's literacy rates) – and most of the US has surprisingly low literacy (about 54% of adults have low English literacy and 21% are illiterate) – or for people who aren't proficient enough readers to gain anything from reading something of such a high level. Reading should be accessible to as many people as possible, not gatekeeped. It would be far better as some sort of "annotation creator" though probably, if your goal is more literacy.
Of course, you shouldn't rely on something like this by any means. But it's not bad for a lot of purposes, we shouldn't beat uneducated people while they're down. And either way your literacy really doesn't affect your "stupidity", although a lot of resources with knowledge you might want will require a certain level of literacy.
i see your point, didn't think about the accessibility aspect