An Iowa school district is using AI to ban books | Engadget
www.engadget.com
Mason City Iowa's school district is scrambling to ensure its library collection is ideologically pure enough for the state's new content restrictions ahead of the new school year and has turned to AI for help..
  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    It certainly didn’t take long for AI’s other shoe to drop, what with the emergent technology already being perverted to commit confidence scams and generate spam content.

    We can now add censorship to that list as the Globe Gazette reports the school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district’s libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year.

    Specifically it limits what books can be made available in school libraries and classrooms, requiring titles to be "age appropriate” and without “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.

    As such, the Mason City School District is bringing in AI to parse suspect texts for banned ideas and descriptions since there are simply too many titles for human reviewers to cover on their own.

    Per the district, a “master list” is first cobbled together from “several sources” based on whether there were previous complaints of sexual content.

    “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.

    I’m a bot and I’m open source!