In the lead-up to the 2023-24 school year, 19 books (including one entire book series) were pulled from shelves and placed in storage by the Mason City Community School District in Mason City, Iowa. What makes this case stand out amid a recent wave of troubling book bans all over the U.S. is that the decision as to whether or not they should be pulled was informed by the outputs of the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
The book removals followed the passage of a piece of Iowa state legislation called Senate File 496 which bans discussions of “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” for kindergarten through sixth grade students, and requires that books in libraries be age-appropriate. Notably, those containing depictions of sex are now illegal in Mason City school libraries.
Carrying out this ban was, apparently, tricky for school administrators. Bridgette Exman, who works as the district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction told Popular Science that the age-appropriateness requirement was, “pretty subjective,” and she also told the Iowa newspaper the Gazette that it was “simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements.”
“The depictions or descriptions of sex acts filter is more objective,” Exman noted, and could be boiled down to a yes-or-no question, if only there were some system that would provide a point-blank answer to pretty much any yes-or-no question.
“We used Chat GPT [sic] to help answer that question,” Exman told PopSci.
Exman described the book filtering procedure to PopSci as pretty simple: ChatGPT was asked, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” An affirmative answer got a book pulled from circulation. In Mashable’s tests, ChatGPT answers these questions with a rather circuitous answer, explaining the book and its significance, and putting the sex act in context. Nonetheless, it will sometimes provide a clear yes answer.
However, according to PopSci’s Andrew Paul, while Mason City administrators pulled 19 books for explicit sex as confirmed by ChatGPT, only four of those were confirmed to have explicit sex in Paul’s own tests.
Per the Gazette, the 19 removed books are:
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Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
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Sold by Patricia McCormick
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The “A Court of Mist and Fury” series by Sarah J. Maas (counted as one book)
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Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson
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Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
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Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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Beloved by Toni Morrison
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Looking for Alaska by John Green
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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
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Crank by Ellen Hopkins
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Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
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An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
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The Color Purple by Alice Walker
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Feed by M.T. Anderson
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Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger
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Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
