School district uses ChatGPT to help ban library books

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 205 points – School district uses ChatGPT to help ban library books
popsci.com

Faced with new legislation, Iowa's Mason City Community School District asked ChatGPT if certain books 'contain a description or depiction of a sex act.'

29

The ban attempts to comply with a new law requiring Iowa school library catalogs to be both “age appropriate” and devoid of “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”

Sounds like a stupid law.

We really shouldn't have conservatives anymore.

But also chatGPT seems like the wrong tool for this idiotic endeavor.

Massive shout out to the teachers who can still teach that sex ed class without books to describe or show things.

Guess it'll have to be a practical lesson 👀

Expectations: One day we will have an AI that will instantly go through all the books in our library to identity anything sexual so we can ban them and protect the students.

Reality: Due to the nature of the Internet any student at anytime can access all the porn in the world from their personal device they carry around everywhere.

How about cutting everyones dick off? /s

Can we not start with the '/s' horseshit on this site? It's absolutely awful and unnecessary.

Yeah because text is a form of communication that is really easy to get subtext/tone from /s

Nah, you're right it's utterly impossible to imply sarcasm. It is so excruciatingly hard that we have to ruin the sarcasm in order to point it out, but you know what? Better that than inflict the mental trauma of misunderstanding on someone! God knows how much PTSD you've avoided triggering in others. You truly are a hero.

Is this really that much of an issue? Chill out buddy. It's text on a website. We're not murdering anyone.

You're murdering sarcasm, and, as a Brit, I very much resent that.

tone indicators are useful for indicating tone. if you don't want to use them, don't, but anyone that wants to will, and those that need them will apreciate them. /srs

How useful it is to change the tone in order to identify it, not obnoxious in the slightest. Save yourself a few scary downvotes, though, don't you? So I guess it's worth it.

after much deliberation, the mason city community school district board of education came to the unanimous decision to ban selections from the public library based on the recommendations of a popular chat bot that has recently gained notoriety for simply making shit up. the board felt the unorthodox mode of handling the important choice of children's education and enrichment was justified as none of the members had actually read a book. the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, who's job is literally to make such decisions, responded with further explanation, "i have more important things to do."

Republicans don't want children to know what abuse is so that they can't readily articulate (or reference books that depict abuse) when the same is being done to them at home.

The p in gop stands for projection, and conservatives constantly scream about "others" abusing kids.

And yet those idiots won't stop their own sex acts and die out already.

Rem_inds me of the line from Indiana Jones and the last crusade:

Why did you find back for ze book Dr Jones? Slap! What is in ze book, Dr Jones? Slap!! What does it tell you zat it doesn't tell us?? (Catches hand) It tells me that goose-stepping morons such as yourself should try READING books instead of burning them!

To be fair to the schools, btw, they acknowledge that this isn't really a good system. They're not excited to ban books, they're trying to cover their asses legally from a vague, predatory law designed to force librarians to self censor anything that might possibly risk popping a fundy's fabricated bubble.

In their defense there is all kinds of satanic trans buttfucking and child vivisection by gay vampires in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Signed, ChatGPT.