[Ordered to remove unsuitable books from their libraries, school
administrators in Iowa outsourced the job to AI. So long, The Color
Purple, Beloved, The Handmaid’s Tale …]
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CAN’T DECIDE WHICH BOOKS TO BAN? LEAVE IT TO CHATGPT!  
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Arwa Mahdawi
August 22, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Ordered to remove unsuitable books from their libraries, school
administrators in Iowa outsourced the job to AI. So long, The Color
Purple, Beloved, The Handmaid’s Tale … _

Safer on screen? The 1986 movie of The Color Purple. , Warner
Bros./Allstar

 

What do you get when you combine artificial intelligence with human
stupidity? There are, unfortunately, numerous responses to that
question. But in this particular case the answer can be found in
Iowa’s Mason City Community School District
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school administrators are using ChatGPT
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books.

Ahead of the new school year, school staff have been busy trying to
comply with a new state law, Senate File 496
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Parental Rights and Transparency Act, requiring every book in Iowa
public school libraries to be “age appropriate” and devoid of
“descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act”. Of course,
nobody wants hardcore porn in school libraries, but this sweeping
bill, which also restricts education about gender identity and sexual
orientation, isn’t trying to prevent that nonexistent problem:
it’s about indoctrination. Republicans don’t want kids learning
anything that goes against their narrow worldview so, over the past
couple of years, they’ve gone on a censorship orgy, trying to ban
everything from gender studies
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to psychology to African American studies.

A hallmark of Republican legislation is its ambiguity. The party
can’t explicitly decree “we want to ban everything we don’t
like”, because that would be blatantly unconstitutional. So instead,
it couches its laws in vague language like that contained in this
book-banning law. There is very little guidance in the legislation as
to what constitutes a description of a sex act. (Would “the two
elephants mated” count, for example?) The only real pointer given is
that sex in religious texts
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like the Bible is absolutely fine and exempt from the law. That
ambiguity gives them plausible deniability: we’re not banning books,
we’re protecting children! It also tends to make people over-comply
for fear of violating the law. One state senator told the Iowa Capital
Dispatch
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that she knew a teacher who had removed every book from her classroom
to make sure she was in compliance with the new law. Others have
resorted to using AI to help them navigate the legislation.

“It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these
new requirements,” Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of
Mason City School District, said in a statement
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quoted by Iowa newspaper the Gazette. “Therefore, we are using what
we believe is a defensible process to identify books that should be
removed from collections.”

How many books are we talking about? Hundreds, thousands, tens of
thousands? Nope. The answer to this question is the same as the answer
to life, the universe, and everything
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42. The district had compiled a list of 42 titles
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from banned book lists across the US which needed review. Nobody, let
alone an educator, could possibly read 42 books! Hence the need for
technology.

So how does ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that is incapable of
critical thought and whose processes, training method and underlying
training datasets are worryingly opaque
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figure out which books are too lewd for the eyes of young Iowans?
Nobody knows. It’s not clear, for example, if ChatGPT has actually
“read” the books it has been asked about. All we know is that an
administrator typed “does [x] book contain ‘a description or
depiction of a sex act’?” into ChatGPT, then waited for a reply.
ChatGPT, which doesn’t have a moral compass, did its job diligently
and without protest: it identified 19 books as being too scandalous
and they were pulled from the shelves. The banned books
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included The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Beloved by Toni Morrison
and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

While dystopian, Exman’s tactics are smart in their own way. It is,
as she put it, a “defensible process”. If the powers-that-be later
find a contraband book in the library, school administrators can
simply blame ChatGPT. What, one wonders, do the people behind ChatGPT
make of all this? They keep going on about how AI is going to advance
humanity. And yet, as cases like this demonstrate, AI is far more
likely to be harnessed to advance the views and agenda of powerful
people. Welcome to a future where the computer constantly says no.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

* Censorship; Artificial Intelligence; ChatGPT;
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