Fuck AI

Tbh, no. At least regarding your technical critisisms. Try out a LLM with a large context window. Claude3 is currently the best. Feed it a chapter or 10 of a book and then ask it to write another chapter, about an unrelated topic and it will just do it. No problem. Creative writing/condensing/summarising is one of the strengths of these things, if given enough info in the active context. Just asking for a style doesn't really work, but its also not necessary here. Reproducing akkurate facts however is a big problem, which makes using them dangerous. So the retaining of information would actually have to be manually checked by a human, as LLMs are prone to hallucinations and will make errors or changes to fit the writing style. It can write nice sounding paragraphs about spatial or logical impossibilities any day though. Finally, quality greatly depends on the people feeding the LLM, because low effort will also produce low effort outputs.

And I don't really follow what you mean with your comment of "hideous mockery". The people who can read and understand the original version, will do so and never read the simplified version instead of the original. Only individuals "incapable" of dealing with the original would even interact with the simplified version. Isnt it better if at least part of the authors message can be conveyed, rather than nothing? That person never even touching on the ideas of that book? I am currently writing a SciFi book myself and I would definitely want to personally look over and check the simple version of it. But I would see it more like something in the way of an audio book. Reading doesn't have to be difficult and I would want as many people as possible to have the ability to read my book, regardless of their reading level.

All that said, I am talking about the concept here, the specific implementation of the image above is likely going to be some half assed garbage.