An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban

lmao this isn’t going to work at all, but it’ll make literally everyone mad, including the people who think this is a good idea.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials.

Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be “age appropriate” and devoid of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.

"It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements," said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district, in a statement quoted by The Gazette.

In the wake of ChatGPT's release, it has been increasingly common to see the AI assistant stretched beyond its capabilities—and to read about its inaccurate outputs being accepted by humans due to automation bias, which is the tendency to place undue trust in machine decision-making.

"This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results," Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars.

"There's something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can't understand books and can't critically think at all," Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.

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