Ars TechnicaAn Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban
Official: "It is simply not feasible to read every book" for depictions of sex.
Colin Dean@arstechnica “Elected to lead, not to read”
sumokirby (Chris)@arstechnica This is so comical it's hard to believe it's real.
arkottke@sumokirby @arstechnica Seriously 😑
Losfromcp@arstechnica It's both enraging and demoralizing to see #chatgpt #AI used for these #fascist #bookbanning efforts
Ann Thorpe (she/her)@losfromcp @arstechnica don't worry, the uses for Llama will be worse. Just wait until what 4chan and #huggingface cook up start reviewing resumés. At least there's a small chance OpenAI will wag the finger here.
Lennart J. Kurzweg 🇪🇺@losfromcp @arstechnica Chin up! Students can use the same tool to have it explain the contents of these books, or ask how they could still read them.
If my experience is anything to go by, telling children to not (read) something, will make them want to (read) it even more!
Also "banning books" is so not-USA-like, but at the same time it fits with the news I read from over there so much.. Haha!
Covidiocracy@arstechnica For fuck's sake, make it stop. If nobody is even complaining about a "depiction of sex" in a particular book, then clearly it isn't harming anyone, not even sensitive little magats.
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)@arstechnica Geee, I hope it doesn't read something like… I donno… the Bible…
Pretty sure there's a passage somewhere or two about sex… and I think it was between two male characters too.
derrydavis
ErevanDB"Do you have even the slightest idea how little it narrows it down?"
YellowPup@arstechnica this should end well.
Ben Schorr 
@arstechnica Who is going to tell them that ChatGPT hasn't read every book either?
Harry Beard@bschorr @arstechnica Ironically named hate group Moms for Liberty would argue actually reading books you want to ban is an unnecessary burden on parents. 🙄
@srf_va @arstechnica Yes, well Klanned Karenhood isn't really known for rational arguments.
Pseudandry 
@arstechnica I'm sure the spicy autocomplete that has regularly and frequently made stuff up isn't going to cause any problems being used this way, no sir
Jamie Hamel-Smith“spicy autocomplete” is my new favorite Chat GPT description 😆
@jamiehs I can't take credit, I saw it ages ago on the bird app, but it's SO useful to take the shine off of chatGPT with people who incorrectly assume it can do anything
RRBWhy don't they just go ahead, apply Rule 34 of the Internet and ban everything.
Log 🪵@arstechnica With so many bad ideas out there it's easier than ever to mash two of them together to make a super-bad idea.
Milcom MiasmaI keep trying to figure out what we did to put us in this, the stupidest timeline. Then I remember 2016 and I think to myself "Oh yeah, that would totally put us in a world of stupid" and I am sad.
@arstechnica they're aware ChatGPT hasn't read the books either, right? They might as well use a magic 8 ball.
Gina B Fla
Lunya 
Rick Mycroft@arstechnica What happens when it lists books that don't actually exist?
Danie van der Merwe@arstechnica banning is the direct opposite of freedoms and choices...
birdpoofRepublicans must clearly stop breeding entirely to ensure nothing about sex ever comes adjacent to their existence.
3rd Snowman of the Apocalypse@arstechnica YES THE F*CK IT IS.. HOLY SH*T, YOU WANNA BAN THE BOOK READ IT YOURSELF, LAZY-ASS PURITANS!!!
if I unerstand this correctly, people are angry because a 13 years old student can't read adult material books or something similar for his "science project" is that correct?
TheAvgOni
KanaMauna“it would not likely be able to consider the entire text of most books at once, though it may be able to process it in chunks. Even if it did, one should not trust the result as reliable without verifying it—which would require a human to read the book anyway.”
So no getting out of doing your homework no matter how hard you try. /s
@arstechnica The Bible is in trouble then.
Mike Marsh@arstechnica All books can be indecent books, though recent books are bolder. For filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder.
Orca 🌻 | 🎀 | 🪁 | 🏴🏳️⚧️@arstechnica …… Sorry if that troubles you but I'm gonna swear in Chinese this time:
你他X是不是头壳被水泥车创了。
你他X是不是头壳被水泥车创了。
Oran Magal@arstechnica The zealots are on a book banning spree all over the US. Maybe they should play it safe and just prevent their children from ever learning to read?
@OranMagal @arstechnica They are working on it...
@arstechnica I want to believe that all these officials are illiterate so they have to rely on AI.
Ceremus@arstechnica Nice, making sure to use the tool known to produce false data.
"When we practice fascism, we make sure it's the incompetent kind."
"When we practice fascism, we make sure it's the incompetent kind."
@arstechnica Simpler solution: Parents doing their job and deciding what's right for their children (assuming they aren't ignorant or apathetic)
Kwame Joseph Licensed Realtor@arstechnica I don’t understand the rational with banning books. I would think banning a book is against freedom of speech. However I’m not a constitutional lawyer.
Laurie Leiker@[email protected] good grief
Amy Dentata@arstechnica “The question of whether a book contains a description of depiction of a sex act can only be accurately answered by a model that has seen the full text of the book”
Incorrect! The model can and will produce wrong answers regardless of what is in its training set. It will produce wrong answers even if it has been fed the text directly. LLMs do not produce accurate results, period, as they are just text generators, not answer machines.
This is stupid on top of stupid on top of stupid.
Dan Shick@amydentata @arstechnica yes, but of course they don’t care about facts. they’re just happy to blame their moral panic on computers. it’s not like the general public understands well enough to push back!
Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)@amydentata @arstechnica The idea that an LLM is "accurate" is ludicrous. That's not how the technology works. 😡
Atomic FoxI don't understand why people aren't getting this. ChatGPT and its relatives are statistical models for generating plausible strings, to all intents and purposes super-duper Markov chains. They don't know anything, they don't answer questions.
Aargh. But there are people out there betting billions of dollars, and in some cases human lives, that people will choose to pull the wool over their own eyes. And experience suggests that they will, at least for a while.
Pippin@amydentata @arstechnica And by the way they work, picking the most likely next word to continue the text, they are designed to produce plausible-LOOKING output, regardless of accuracy or anything else. LLMs are literally automated con-artists.
🌊Ann Morris🐕🍀🌎🌊🌊@arstechnica Meanwhile, Iowa school board members know, intimately, the names of every single stripper, titles of every XXX rated adult movie and how much every call girl charges.
sandywb14
Violet@arstechnica
Do their criteria include ancient instructions on how to perform an abortion?
Do their criteria include ancient instructions on how to perform an abortion?
@arstechnica This will doubtless go as well as using ChatGPT to generate citations and analyses for legal briefs. Give a complex tool to laypersons and watch hilarity ensue.
Lawrence@arstechnica in the history of education, there have probably been worse ideas than this... I just can't think of any.
Richard R LeeIf there was any lingering doubt that #Iowa is a #ShitHoleState in #Trumpistan then this dispels it.
GangstaYid@arstechnica Oh, they're using an application which infamously lies unhesitantly about what it doesn't know? What could *possibly* go wrong?
Cave Cattum
Harry Callahan@arstechnica Do porn sites work in Iowa? Crybabies preventing nothing.
Vote for people eager to participate in responsible government. Culture wars are for people incapable of understanding the government or its purpose.
Owain Sutton@arstechnica Tell me you don't know what's in the bible, without telling me you don't know what's in the bible.