School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books

From PopSci.com (Aug. 14, 2023):

Against a nationwide backdrop of book bans and censorship campaigns, Iowa educators are turning to ChatGPT to help decide which titles should be removed from their school library shelves in order to legally comply with recent Republican-backed state legislation, PopSci has learned.

According to an August 11 article in the Iowa state newspaper The Gazette, spotted by PEN America, the Mason City Community School District recently removed 19 books from its collection ahead of its quickly approaching 2023-24 academic year. The ban attempts to comply with a new law requiring Iowa school library catalogs to be both “age appropriate” and devoid of “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.” Speaking with The Gazette last week, Mason City’s Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Bridgette Exman argued it was “simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements.”

“Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” Exman tells PopSci via email. “At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here really is a defensible process.”

According to The Gazette, the resulting strategy involved compiling a master list of commonly challenged books, then utilizing a previously unnamed “AI software” to supposedly provide textual analysis for each title. Flagged books were then removed from Mason City’s 7-12th grade school library collections and “stored in the Administrative Center” as educators “await further guidance or clarity.” Titles included Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights.

“We are confident this process will ensure the spirit of the law is enacted here in Mason City,” Exman said at the time. When asked to clarify what software Mason City administrators harnessed to help with their decisions on supposedly sexually explicit material, Exman revealed their AI tool of choice: “We used Chat GPT [sic] to help answer that question,” says Exman, who believes Senate File 496’s “age-appropriateness” stipulation is “pretty subjective… [but] the depictions or descriptions of sex acts filter is more objective.” [read more]

Not a bad idea. But what about false positives and false negatives? If ChatGPT determines a book to be banned, the school district shouldn't automatically ban it. The AI should instead label the book as "possibly banned" and then let the school district make the final decision. People shouldn't be left out of the decision loop.