this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Like the other person, I’m disgusted by this. Aside from an educational case, where a person can use a simplified version to establish context and use it to learn how to read the original (which seems dubious), what’s an argument for this?
Human-written simplified versions of classic books have already been a thing for a very long time, as a way to make the stories accessible to people with intellectual disabilities. LLMs should probably not be used for this!
Yeah I kinda feel like it’s incumbent upon the translator to determine what themes are gonna get cut and what phrases need to stay to reinforce those themes or plot elements that make the grade.
I wouldn’t trust a llm to do that.
"modernized" bibles have been around for a few decades at least. that's not really a point in favor of the practice.
People learning English as a second language?
ideally, but we know it will just be used to make 12th grade reading into 4th grade reading.
Half of Americans can't read above grade 6
LLMs are class reductionists
I don't think that's the intended audience, and regardless the thing to do in that case is just get an easier text instead of pretend that this is the same thing, which is such a perversion of literature as an art form rather than just a bunch of Lore that you can be cultured if you know.
Summaries to help someone follow the text are a useful teaching tool, but this is plainly being proposed to replace the text, which is literally in some ways worse than reading its Wikipedia page because at least the Wiki will simply describe some of the themes and allusions and other more connotative elements that here only exist if they turn up in the crass plot summary that they are calling the text. Just read a "Simple English Wikipedia" page or SparkNotes or something if knowing Lore is that important to you for some reason.
Eh, I think that’s a pretty bad use case.
A long time ago my high school Spanish textbook used excerpts from some novel we had all been forced to read in earlier grades as practice reading sections. After I got to the end of the second or third level, I went back to read the first parts and realized that in order to make the text appropriate for what early learners had under their belts the translation had taken some liberties recognizable even to a high school student with a weak grasp of the language.
Of course, there’s a good reason for that! Translation for the purposes of education is different from translation for the purposes of conveying the texts meaning.
So it would seem like a tool intended to translate a text that’s relatively difficult to read for native speakers into one easy to read to native speakers wouldn’t be the best option for language learners.
And rather than just go off that one experience, I can corroborate it with advice from language teachers to choose texts that aren’t above my own level.
So I don’t think it’s a good tool for a language learner.