An 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.::Official: “It is simply not feasible to read every book” for depictions of sex.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    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.


    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

      • nous@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I think there is a big difference. This bot is given the text and asked to summarise it. But

        To determine which books fit the bill, Exman asks ChatGPT: “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If the answer is yes, the book will be removed from circulation.

        So was only given the title and asked one question about it. There is no saying if GPTChat included the books in question in its training set, or any online reviews or anything else about the book in question.

        That is a fairly big difference. If they had fed it the books contents that would likely make it more accurate and closer to what this bot is doing, though still not 100%.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students

      That’s just terrible journalism. How can the writer possibly know what they believe?