A new AI-backed app which is aimed at simplifying the language of books to suit different reader levels, has ended up whitewashing several classics.
Magibooks which is exclusively available for iOS users employs artificial intelligence to alter the language of books such as “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “Crime and Punishment”.
Its website says that Magibooks gives “the power to read any book, no matter your English level.”
The app is free to use and launched at the start of this month. Users can access five different versions of 10 classic books, including “Dracula,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Three Musketeers,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and “The Great Gatsby”.
The difficulty levels include: Original, Advanced, Intermediate, Beginner and Elementary.
However, in the process of “democratising stories”, as the website claims, the app makes some of the greatest literary lines seem bland.
Lines such as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is changed to “It was a time when things were very good and very bad.”
The 219 controversial occurrences of the N-word in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” are replaced on Magibook with the noun “Helper.”
Linguistic experts are cautioning against this technology which attempts to strip away the complexity of classic literary works. “There might be some discrepancies when a whole book is ingested and an abridged version’s spit out, and could give people a different idea about what these stories are about,” said Cassandra Jacobs, a linguistics professor at the University of Buffalo, reported the New York Post.
She called the app “alarming,” and said that the exposure of complicated text to readers “makes us smarter.”
She added that authors choose specific words “very deliberately” when they write, and those ideas can easily be lost when AI substitutes them.
The app’s developer, Louis Gachot, has reportedly designed the app for “English learners” including children, parents, teachers and also people with dyslexia and severe ADHD.
