17 ms·
Iowa School District is using ChatGPT to determine banned books
- 99_00 3y ago[flagged]
- jandrese 3y agoDoes the algorithm ban the sex ed textbooks, or does the school only have the abstinence only books? Also, the list of books that are actually banned is quite eye opening: Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan Sold by Patricia McCormick A Court of Mist and Fury (series) by Sarah J. Maas Monday's Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson Tricks by Ellen Hopkins Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood Beloved by Toni Morrison Looking for Alaska by John Green The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Crank by Ellen Hopkins Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser The Color Purple by Alice Walker Feed by M.T. Anderson Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou I'm a bit surprised that Ulysses by James Joyce didn't make the list, but maybe the AI couldn't get through it either.
- throwaway894345 3y agoI'm pretty skeptical of these so-called "book ban" laws, but it's not obvious to me that these books are definitively "age appropriate" for K-6 (which seems to be your implication).
- skywhopper 3y agoYou're misreading the text. The K-6 references are about banning teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity. The parts about "Age appropriate books" are specifically for all school levels K-12 (scroll down in the statute to find the twelfth grade reference). I guarantee you that these books were not on the shelves in K-6 libraries.
- throwaway894345 3y agoAh, that must be it. Thanks for the correction.
- jandrese 3y agoNobody in K-6 is reading The Handmaid's Tale anyway. These book bans are about High School libraries, at least according to the linked law in the article[1]. The law claims it applies to all "publicly funded schools". [1]https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/LGE/90/SF496.pdf https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/LGE/90/SF496.pd...
- kstrauser 3y agoI would’ve. I was deep into Stephen King at that age.
- throwaway894345 3y agoAh, my bad. The link I saw said K-6.
- sambapa 3y ago<chad meme>Yes</chad meme>
- SR2Z 3y agoYeah, because there's a difference between pornography and "sex acts." Plenty of YA novels have sex acts in them, because children need to have AT LEAST an academic understanding of the process and social context around it. To say otherwise invites teenage pregnancy, which unlike moral outrage (which by its very nature is not evidence supported), causes actual serious consequences in the lives of innocent people. It's especially funny because the places which are enacting reactionary policies like this one are also the ones that don't offer sex-ed :(
- CP3f6kMA 3y agoOr they offer provably inferior abstinence only education
- brazzledazzle 3y agoIt's not inferior if your goal is a large amount of lower class babies growing up with few prospects outside of the military and retail jobs for the rest of their lives.
- luma 3y ago> Seems like a rational use of technology to ensure compliance with a rational public policy Seems like a gross overreach of the morality police continuing to press nonsense issues to rile up their voting base, brought to you by exactly the people you'd think would do such a thing.
- wellthisisgreat 3y ago> Are there people who support age inappropriate books, or books with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act in classrooms and school libraries? yeah sex scenes are fine, unless we are talking erotica kind of writing (which isn't in school programs), so you're getting people to grow into normal, healthy adults and not late-blooming porn-binging incel mass shooters
- skywhopper 3y agoThese bans are usually in junior high and high school libraries. Even in public libraries, these books are not shelved in the childrens' section. This is not about six year olds being confronted with pornography, but rather critically acclaimed novels that reflect the actual lives of sixteen year olds. These bans do nothing to protect children. They only remove literature from school libraries.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoLotta kids only find out what they’ve experienced is sex abuse by reading a description of it in a book. What’s appropriate is cultural and personal, should be decided by some matrix of parents, child themselves, and educators who know them personally. Trying to universalize mushy concepts like “age appropriate” will end with the removal of potentially anything. Which is exactly the point. I’m sure the architects of this are very grateful for your assistance in normalizing it.
- kstrauser 3y agoAge inappropriate according to whom? I can think of all sorts of stuff that’s objectionable in places like Florida but perfectly fine elsewhere. Example: a story with a gay character might flip out Ron Desantis but not raise an eyebrow in Berkeley. No one wants age inappropriate stuff. We just have some wildly different ideas of what that means.
- 99_00 3y ago>I can think of all sorts of stuff that’s objectionable in places like Florida but perfectly fine elsewhere Can you name a tittle that Florida has removed from public schools but you feel is appropriate?
- kstrauser 3y agoHere's a whole list of 'em: https://pen.org/banned-books-florida/ https://pen.org/banned-books-florida/ There are the usual ones like "My Two Dads and Me" and "My Two Moms and Me". "The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question", LOL? "Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog", WTF. "Henry Aaron’s Dream", for people who find baseball offensive, I guess. "The Life of Rosa Parks". "Thank You, Jackie Robinson"; more baseball hate. "Unstoppable: How Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team Defeated Army" shows some people hate football, too. Each of those is appropriate for kids, and I'd love to hear specific reasons why someone believes one isn't.
- 99_00 3y ago>I'd love to hear specific reasons why someone believes one isn't. How can you disagree with the reasons those books were removed when you admit you don't know the reason.
- kstrauser 3y agoIt’s on the people banning a Rosa Parks story to provide the extraordinary evidence that it was deserved.
- brazzledazzle 3y agoThese things can be weaponized by changing the definitions so I'm not as inclined to trust a model that could be trained by those with ulterior motives. But to your question: There were books available to me in late grade school and middle school that had sexual acts and they're (rightfully in my opinion) considered classics or at least important reading. Some parents might consider those inappropriate and if they had their way I might not have been exposed to those works until much later when their impact would have been vastly decreased. This idea that sex or sexual acts are inherently "bad" is puritanical thinking and doesn't really serve anyone's interests who has to participate in the real world where sex is part of the fabric of our existence. If parents want to impose a puritanical mindset on to their children that's their business and maybe a compromise is that they should be able to exclude their kids from reading certain material just like they can excuse them from learning sex ed.
- 99_00 3y agoNo one said sex is "bad". Support for explicit sexual content in public schools is the minority opinion. As such, it is up to supporters to present the case for it's benefits, and the responsibility of parents who hold those views to expose their children to descriptions and depictions of sexual acts.
- brazzledazzle 3y agoSupport for sexual content in public schools K-6, perhaps. But these bans apply to high school as well. I'm not going to dance this dance with you though. We both know that there are ulterior motives here that extend well beyond "sexual acts" and are absolutely about shaming or hiding the existence of homosexuals, trans people, etc. from teenagers for as long as possible. You're arguing from the position of their barely disguised pretense and literally no one actually believes that.
- 99_00 3y agoHeterosexual sex acts in books are allowed?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orochimaaru 3y agoSex education happens in 6th grade. Unless you’ve been living under a rock most kids already know what sex is 6th grade onwards if not earlier.
- recursive4 3y ago[flagged]
- tedunangst 3y agoWhat's inaccurate about it?
- guywithahat 3y agoWell they're asking it if a particular title contains porn/descriptions of sex, and then someone else is deciding whether it should be banned. The AI is not "automatically" banning books, and it's not really reading them either
- mcphage 3y ago> The AI is not [...] really reading them either Then what is it doing, exactly?
- causi 3y agoSeems 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.
- falcolas 3y agoIt'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).
- causi 3y agoI should've been more specific. The statute is reasonable for young children; this method of enforcing it with AI is not.
- falcolas 3y agoFWIW, 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."
- constantcrying 3y ago[flagged]
- kstrauser 3y agoWhat, pray tell, would?
- constantcrying 3y agoIt is called "curation". Libraries are finite, pretending it is some awful act that they remove books is just stupid US culture war nonsense. Libraries regularly remove books and buy new ones. It isn't some great evil that they don't include a certain book. There are dozens of stories like this "X book is BANNED" and then it is literally some library not buying it.
- kstrauser 3y agoA library choosing to remove books that don’t meet its criteria is curation. A library having to remove books because someone else told it to is banning.
- constantcrying 3y ago>A library having to remove books because someone else told it to is banning. No. A "Ban" means the government legally prohibits circulation. Stop these ridicolous word games.
- clucas 3y agoWould you consider Facebook preventing a user from posting to be "banning" or "censorship"? Even though they can still post on, say, Twitter?
- constantcrying 3y agoNonsense analogy. The right one is not getting invited to a party and crying about getting banned.
- endisneigh 3y agoThis kind of thing is why I’m not a big fan of governments deciding many things for me.
- krapp 3y agoGovernments 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.
- pauldenton 3y agoQanon? Republican party? Does anyone remember Senator Obama in 2007&2008 running on Marriage being between a man and a woman? https://youtu.be/NbIurm5ou84 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
- krapp 3y agoYou 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.
- HillRat 3y agoFor 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.
- chpatrick 3y agoEarly 2023 called and they want their stochastic parrot back.
- orochimaaru 3y agoThis one should have banned a lot of religious books including the Bible.
- krapp 3y agoIt'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.
- pauldenton 3y agoThe 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 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
- piotrkaminski 3y agoThe 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.”
- Gys 3y agoI 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?
- piotrkaminski 3y agoI'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".
- soco 3y agoI'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.
- marpstar 3y agoThis 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-want-to-defund-public-libraries-book-bans https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/5/23711417/republicans-w...
- joshmanders 3y ago> 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.
- code_thr 3y ago[flagged]
- drewcoo 3y ago> 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!
- rokkitmensch 3y agoHail Eris!
- yttribium 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- heavyarms 3y agoWhen people are faced with negative outcomes resulting from things they approve of, they do this passive-aggressive bit where they pretend to have a valid point.
- nickthegreek 3y agoDraw clear lines then.
- yttribium 3y agoSomehow I suspect the kvetching does not die down when the AG is tasked with drawing up a yearly index librorum prohibitorum.
- sys32768 3y ago[flagged]
- jandrese 3y agoThat doesn't seem accurate either. They're using ChatGPT to provide confirmation on book they have already decided to ban. The books were already flagged, the algorithm is just giving them an comeback for busybodies who ask "Did you read the book before you banned it?"
- pauldenton 3y agoWhen 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)