MADRID (Portaltic/EP) – The Mason City Community School District in Iowa, United States used the Artificial Intelligence (AI) of the ChatGPT chatbot to examine and identify books that contained descriptions or representations of a sexual act, removing nineteen titles of school libraries as a result.
The State of Iowa has recently passed legislation that requires books available in school libraries to be “age appropriate” and not include “descriptions or visual depictions of a sexual act.”
In this framework, in order to comply with this legislation, the Mason City (Iowa) community school district has removed 19 books from school libraries for its 2023-24 academic year, as they included some inappropriate sexual content, as reported by the Mason City School Board and picked up The Gazette.
However, as Popular Science has learned, to determine which books should be removed from libraries for inappropriate content, the Mason City school board used OpenAI’s chatbot AI, ChatGPT.
In this sense, the deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction of the Mason City community school district, Bridggette Exman, explained in a statement that school libraries have a large number of book collections and that, therefore, “it was simply not feasible to read all books” to filter the requirements of the new law.
Thus, the board members decided to use AI to facilitate the process of identifying the books that needed to be removed, and to do so, they turned to ChatGPT.
According to Exman’s statements to Popular Science, first a list of “commonly questioned” books was compiled, after which all titles that were questioned for issues other than those contemplated by law were eliminated.
The books that were finally on the list were analyzed by ChatGPT based on the question: “Does the book contain a description or representation of a sexual act?” If the answer was affirmative, the book was withdrawn from school libraries and was stored.
In the end, a total of 19 books were stored thanks to the consultation with ChatGPT, including titles such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar; I know why Maya Angelou’s caged bird sings; or The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
However, the method of book selection has been questioned, as ChatGPT’s responses to the sexual content of the various removed works vary markedly. As found by Popular Science, when ChatGPT was asked again if The Kite Runner had any sexual content, the AI replied that it contains “little or no sexually explicit content.”
