20 votes

Using artificial intelligence to ban books only makes the problem worse

5 comments

  1. [2]
    anadem
    Link
    The banned books (from Engadget): So far, the AI has flagged 19 books for removal. They are as follows: Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan Sold by Patricia McCormick A Court of Mist and Fury...

    The banned books (from Engadget):

    So far, the AI has flagged 19 books for removal. They are as follows:
    Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
    Sold by Patricia McCormick
    A Court of Mist and Fury (series) by Sarah J. Maas
    Monday's Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson
    Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
    Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
    The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
    Beloved by Toni Morrison
    Looking for Alaska by John Green
    The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
    Crank by Ellen Hopkins
    Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
    The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
    An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
    The Color Purple by Alice Walker
    Feed by M.T. Anderson
    Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger
    Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar
    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

    7 votes
    1. kfwyre
      Link Parent
      The site Common Sense Media has content reviews for books. I’ve linked the books that have entries there, for anyone interested in cross-referencing ChatGPT’s conclusions with human-based ones....

      The site Common Sense Media has content reviews for books. I’ve linked the books that have entries there, for anyone interested in cross-referencing ChatGPT’s conclusions with human-based ones. Note that you only get three without an account (though I’m sure people here know ways around that).

      Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
      Sold by Patricia McCormick
      A Court of Mist and Fury (series) by Sarah J. Maas
      Monday's Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson
      Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
      Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
      The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
      Beloved by Toni Morrison
      Looking for Alaska by John Green
      The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
      Crank by Ellen Hopkins
      Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
      The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
      An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
      The Color Purple by Alice Walker
      Feed by M.T. Anderson
      Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger
      Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar
      I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

      6 votes
  2. JoshuaJ
    (edited )
    Link
    This is an insane abuse of large language models. They should not be used in this way, give non deterministic answers to the exact same input, and give imagined answers and examples. Frankly this...

    This is an insane abuse of large language models.

    They should not be used in this way, give non deterministic answers to the exact same input, and give imagined answers and examples.

    Frankly this is like Elon promising self driving Teslas.

    The general public or laymen educator sees one thing and understands it as such a thing more capable than it really is, but the provider does not rush to correct them.

    The same is true for openAI allowing people to misunderstand GPT large language models as intelligent systems capable of judgement like this.

    This is a glaring abuse or misunderstanding of how this tool fundamentally works and the fact it’s being used either knowingly or unintentionally by educators for this purpose is mind blowing.

    Surely an existing review system or categorisation exists somewhere such that each school district doesn’t have to interpret the law and come up with their own solution. America gets more insane by the day.

    To be clear nothing from a language model should ever be taken at face value and acted on without further validation.

    To add; I also imagine they literally used chatGPT in the open playground (rather than the API) so someone had to sit there and type in the book name and prompt and then read the answer.

    Which is probably about as much effort as skimming the book or finding an online version to search keywords for, or look up and independent review of the book’s suitability for the relevant age groups.

    What a mess.

    Furthermore we have no proof that their prompt was identical each time and not coerced to give whatever answer the reviewer wanted anyway. (Even if identical the results are non deterministic especially if all were asked subsequently in the same session since the model interprets subsequent requests in context of the prior ones).

    Again this is just a mind blowingly bad idea from every angle besides malice of banning books you don’t agree with under some vague cover of legitimacy.

    6 votes
  3. patience_limited
    Link
    I wonder if anyone has submitted any of the various editions of the Holy Bible for analysis as to whether the contents include “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act", just to make the...

    I wonder if anyone has submitted any of the various editions of the Holy Bible for analysis as to whether the contents include “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act", just to make the point that the law as written is utterly absurd?

    6 votes
  4. Comment removed by site admin
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