A school district in the United States uses ChatGPT to decide which books to ban

By: Bohdan Kaminskyi | 16.08.2023, 21:51
A school district in the United States uses ChatGPT to decide which books to ban

In the US state of Iowa, the administration of a school district removed 19 books containing sex scenes from its libraries. Officials used ChatGPT to search for them.

Here's What We Know

Administrators entered the query "description or depiction of a sex act" into ChatGPT for each disputed work. If the answer was yes, the book was withdrawn from circulation and sent to storage.

Bridgette Exman, deputy director of curriculum, said staff members would not have been able to read every potential book on the list. Instead, the district compiled an initial list of frequently banned books using public sources and then narrowed it down to about 50 titles that were in the library's collection. Exman then checked out each edition using ChatGPT.

The journalists repeated the experiment. When ChatGPT was asked to check all 19 banned books, the AI stated that some of them did not contain sex scenes.

The banned books included The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

Source: The Verge