Do you give toddlers post-grad books to read too? This is such an idiotic slippery slope fallacy that it just reeks of white people privilege.
Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If people use AI to summarize passages of written words to be simpler for those with poor reading skills to be able to more easily comprehend the words, then how are those readers going to improve their poor reading skills?
Dumbing things down with AI isn’t going to make people smarter I bet. This seems like accelerating into Idiocracy
drmoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
FourWaveforms@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
Why do you think their reading skills are poor?
vermaterc@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Wikipedia is not made to teach people how to read, it is meant to share knowledge. For me, they could even make Wikipedia version with hieroglyphics if that would make understanding content easier
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Novels are also not made to teach people how to read, but reading them does help the reader practice their reading skills. Beside that point, Wikipedia is not hard to understand in the first place.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sorry, but that’s absolutely wrong - the complexity of articles can vary wildly. Many are easily understandable, while many others are not understandable without a lot of prerequisite knowledge in the domain (e.g. mathematics stuff).
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I am not a native speaker, but my knowledge of the english language is better than most people i know, having no issues reading scientific papers and similar complex documents. Some wikipedia article intros, especially in the mathematics, are not comprehensible for anyone but mathematicians, and therefore fail the objective to give the average person an overview of the material.
It’s fine for me if i am not able to grasp the details of the article because of missing prerequisite knowledge (and i know how to work with integrals and complex numbers!), but the intro should at least not leave me wondering what the article is about.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 day ago
People aren’t reading Wikipedia articles with the intention of getting better at reading.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 day ago
By becoming interested in improving their poor reading skills. You won’t make people become interested in that by having everything available only in complex language, it’s just going to make them skip over your content. Otherwise there shouldn’t be people with poor reading skills, since complex language is already everywhere in life.
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Nope. Reading skills are improved by being challenged by complex language, and the effort required to learn new words to comprehend it. If the reader is interested in the content, they aren’t going to skip it. Dumbing things down only leads to dumbing things down.
For example, look at all the iPad kids who can’t use a computer for shit. Kids who grew up with computers HAD to learn the more complex interface of computers to be able to do the cool things they wanted to do on the computer. Now they don’t because they don’t have to. Therefore if you get everything dumbed down to 5th Grade reading level, that’s where the common denominator will settle. Overcoming that apathy requires a challenge to be a barrier to entry.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But they aren’t interested in the content because of the complexity. You may wish that humans work like you describe, but we literally see that they don’t.
What you can do is provide a simplified summary to make people interested, so they’re willing to engage with the more complex language to get deeper knowledge around the topic.