Originally reported in The Gazette, we have an Iowa school board using ChatGPT as a source of truth about a book's content.
Faced with new legislation, Iowa's Mason City Community School District asked ChatGPT if certain books 'contain a description or depiction 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.”
"It's too much work/money/etc to do something we need to do, so we do the worst possible automated job at it" – we've seen this forever from at-scale tech companies with customer support, and now with democratization of AI tools we'll get to see it lower down, too.
What made this great reporting in that Popular Science attempted to reproduce it:
Upon asking ChatGPT, “Do any of the following books or book series contain explicit or sexual scenes?” OpenAI’s program offered PopSci a different content analysis than what Mason City administrators received. Of the 19 removed titles, ChatGPT told PopSci that only four contained “Explicit or Sexual Content.” Another six supposedly contain “Mature Themes but not Necessary Explicit Content.” The remaining nine were deemed to include “Primarily Mature Themes, Little to No Explicit Sexual Content.”
While it isn't stressed in the piece, a familiarity with the tool and its shortcomings really really enabled this story to go to the next level. If I were in a classroom I'd say something like "Use the API and add temperature=0 to make sure you always get the same results," buuut in this case I'm not sure the readers would appreciate it.
The list of banned books:
- "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