Iowa School District is using ChatGPT to determine banned books | Hacker News Reader

Iowa School District is using ChatGPT to determine banned books

engadget.com

32 pointsaduffy101 comments

This is one school board, not the state.

With that said -- I'm in Iowa, my fiancé works in public libraries and for the Iowa Library Association and the ALA as a resource for those facing book challenges, and it's a shit show here (and in most red states) right now. It's largely coordinated by conservative groups (e.g. "Moms for Liberty") who band together to canvass the schools with their "think of the children" pleas.

This is only the beginning after the signing of the Senate File mentioned in the story. The same people bitching about social media companies censoring their tweets are now trying to keep books they don't agree with out of the library.

It's starting in the schools, but the public libraries are next. https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/5/23711417/republicans-w...

> The same people bitching about social media companies censoring their tweets are now trying to keep books they don't agree with out of the library.

Bunch of selfawarewolves aren't they?

Also it's good to see your comment first when I open a link about our state on HN.

> canvass the schools with their "think of the children" pleas

Just a little Sharpie can change "think of the children" into "think, children." Encourage child thought. Hand out Sharpies!

Hail Eris!

For those who RTFA but didn't RTF (original) A, here's the "scanning":

[A]dministrators first compiled a master list of commonly challenged books, then removed all those challenged for reasons other than sexual content. For those titles within Mason City’s library collections, administrators asked ChatGPT the specific language of Iowa’s new law, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” “If the answer was yes, the book will be removed from circulation and stored."

So the text isn't being scanned; instead, they're relying (as we've seen before in other domains) on the temperature-dependent output of a stochastic parrot to make censorship decisions, which brings up procedural due process concerns at a minimum.

Early 2023 called and they want their stochastic parrot back.

This one should have banned a lot of religious books including the Bible.

It's OK, all of the sex in the Bible is straight. Including the incest and rape, and that one time YHWH pulled a Zeus with another man's wife. It's all literally by the book.

The bible gives Adam & Eve the dignity of the Fig Leaf If you look at Christopher Rufos reporting a lot of school libraries are getting graphic novels that are sexually explicit and show penetration https://youtu.be/S--HBxnCeKM There's also a whole genre of viral videos which follow this call response pattern C:This book is inappropriate for our children to read I want this off our school library shelves R: That's just your opinion lady we're not going to change the status quo C:Let me read what I found inappropriate in that book onto the record R:You can't say that at school board meeting that's inappropriate get out get out get out

The Bible is a collection of many different texts written long long ago with no pictures.

Various people have added various pictures to various versions those texts subject to their own cultural norms.

Many cultures have no issues with various levels of undress that would horrify a Mennonite.

> graphic novels that are sexually explicit and show penetration

OMG the horror.

Myself and multitudes of others grew up in rural areas and saw bulls, stallions, rams, put to cows, mares, and ewes from a young age in addition to browsing medical texts that showed similar things wrt both humans and animals.

Get over it and try to be a little less prudish.

I did not in fact RTF (original) A so thanks for bringing that to my attention, updated the post title.

The Engadget article is a remarkably unhelpful summary, unfortunately, since they imply that there's actually some kind of textual analysis going on.

The law is what it is, but I thought the response from the district was quite rational:

> “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 told 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.”

I cannot read the article. Its a EU thing or because I use Firefox.

However, I am a triggered by reference to 'legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law'. What does that mean? 'Freedom of speech' is very important in the US constitution. Social media is slammed if they apply filtering / censorship. So how come that censorship for books is a 'legal and ethical obligation' but for tweets, Facebook, etc its not?

I'm not a lawyer, and especially not a freedom of speech lawyer, but my understanding is that everyone has an obligation to follow the law whatever it might be (modulo intentional civil disobedience). If the law is unconstitutional then it needs to be challenged in court and struck down that way. AFAICT this law is specific to books in school libraries, which might shelter it from first amendment concerns to some degree.

But again, I'm not a lawyer, and just thought it was cool that the district was like "your law is stupid [implied] and a waste of our time, so we're just gonna throw AI at it so you can't blame us for doing nothing".

I'm honestly not very okay with stupid laws which are nevertheless followed blindly even if by using random means. The end result is like this even worse.

Seems reasonable for grade school children but a wild overreach for high schoolers. If you can be exposed to genitals in the school shower you can exposed to sex in a book.

It's not even reasonable for grade school children. They're not banning porn, they're banning books based on phrases taken with no surrounding context. Some character mentioned once in the book is gay? Banned (one of John Green's books is being banned for exactly this).

I should've been more specific. The statute is reasonable for young children; this method of enforcing it with AI is not.

FWIW, John Green's book was not banned by AI. It (and many others) were banned by people's reports.

Again, it's not like there's porn or smut in these elementary and middle-school libraries. It's culture war hatred targeted at gay and trans people shrouded in "think about the children."

This kind of thing is why I’m not a big fan of governments deciding many things for me.

Governments didn't decide this out of the blue, they're responding to a right-wing moral panic over LGBT content that's the result of the normalization of QAnon's conspiracy theories within the Republican Party. Don't blame government when they do what the people demand, blame the people who come out with their Bibles and pitchforks and demand the heathens be purged.

Qanon? Republican party?

Does anyone remember Senator Obama in 2007&2008 running on Marriage being between a man and a woman? https://youtu.be/NbIurm5ou84 That's what he said at Saddleback Church in August of 2008 It took 6 years for candidate Obama's position to be unfeasible as we saw the departure of Brendan Eich from Mozilla in April of 2014. Don't look at Qanon conspiracies to explain this. Look at commonly Held beliefs 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 years ago, and understand a lot of people are not on board with abolishing rent, abolishing the police, or abolishing the electoral college

You can't engage in historical revisionism when the history is still unfolding, that doesn't work. No, this doesn't go back to Obama, this goes back as far as the "groomer" scare which started last year, yes exclusively within the Republican Party, and yes entirely based on QANon. You could even draw a line directly from this to Pizzagate, since the groomer scare is just the more successful iteration on the theme.

And mentioning "abolishing rent, abolishing the police, or abolishing the electoral college" only tipped your hand. You tried to frame your comment as impartial but you couldn't resist the impulse to add the anti-leftist culture war spin.

When a school library features books on how to be a Boy Scout, but does not feature books on how to be a Hitler Youth, would that be considered "Book banning"? I would consider that "Editorial Discretion". The real difference is it's not new books being introduced, the books are already there because of ideologically motivated teachers and lack of accountability. (Who watches the watchmen? the Teachers Unions. Good luck getting a bad apple fired. Good luck preventing someone else's kid from becoming the victim of a pathological teacher)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com