{"id":1182649,"date":"2023-08-16T17:29:55","date_gmt":"2023-08-16T17:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=441593"},"modified":"2023-08-16T17:29:55","modified_gmt":"2023-08-16T17:29:55","slug":"ai-isnt-banning-books-in-iowa-schools-republicans-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/08\/16\/ai-isnt-banning-books-in-iowa-schools-republicans-are\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Isn\u2019t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"DES<\/p>\n

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speak on a book tour in Des Moines on March 10, 2023.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Rachel Mummey for The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n

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It reads like<\/u> a headline pulled from a dystopian near future: Artificial intelligence is being used to ban books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou from schools. To comply with recently enacted state legislation<\/a> that censors school libraries, Iowa\u2019s Mason City Community School District used ChatGPT to scan a selection of books and flag them for \u201cdescriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.\u201d Nineteen books<\/a> \u2014 including Morrison\u2019s \u201cBeloved,\u201d Margaret Atwood\u2019s \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale,\u201d and Khaled Hosseini\u2019s \u201cThe Kite Runner\u201d \u2014 will be pulled from school library collections prior to the start of the school year.<\/p>\n

This intersection of generative AI and Republican authoritarianism is indeed disturbing. It is not, however, the presage of a future ruled by censorious machines. These are the banal operations of reactionary social control and bureaucratic appeasement today. Unremarkable algorithmic systems have long been used to carry out the plans of the power structures deploying them.<\/p>\n

AI is not banning books. Republicans are. The law with which the school district is complying, signed<\/a> by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in May, is yet another piece of astroturfed right-wing legislation aimed at eliminating<\/a> gender nonconformity, anti-racism, and basic reproductive education from schools, while solidifying the power of the conservative family unit. <\/p>\n

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Bridgette Exman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at the Mason City Community School District, noted in a statement that AI will not replace the district\u2019s standard book banning methods. \u201cWe will continue to rely on our long-established process that allows parents to have books reconsidered,\u201d Exman said.<\/p>\n

At most, the application of ChatGPT here is an example of an already common problem: the use of existing technologies to give a gloss of neutrality to political actions. It\u2019s well established that predictive policing algorithms repeat the same racist patterns of criminalization as the data on which they\u2019re trained \u2014 they\u2019re taught to treat as potentially criminal those demographics the police have already deemed criminal.<\/p>\n

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In Iowa\u2019s book ban, the algorithmic tool \u2014 a large language model, or LLM \u2014 followed a simplistic prompt. It didn\u2019t process for context. The situation in which a school district is looking to ban texts with descriptions of sex acts had already shaped the outcome.<\/p>\n

As Iowa newspaper The Gazette reported<\/a>, the school district compiled a long list of \u201ccommonly challenged\u201d books to feed to the AI program. These are books that fundamentalist Republicans taking over school boards and leading state houses have already sought to ban. Little surprise, then, that books dealing with white supremacy, slavery, gendered oppression, and sexual autonomy were included in the algorithm\u2019s selection.<\/p>\n

Further comments from<\/u> Exman reveal more about the operations of authority at play, which have little to do with powerful AI control. As she told<\/a> Popular Science, \u201cFrankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books. At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here really is a defensible process.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Focusing on concerns about generative AI as a potentially all-powerful force ultimately serves Silicon Valley interests.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Both casually dismissive of the Republican legislation, yet willing to scramble with tech shortcuts to appear in swift compliance, Exman\u2019s approach reflects both cowardice and complicity on the part of the school district. Surely, protecting students\u2019 access to, rather than protecting them from, a rich variety of books is what school systems should be doing with their time. But the myth of algorithmic neutrality makes the book selection \u201cdefensible\u201d in Exman\u2019s terms, both to right-wing enforcers and critics of their pathetic law.<\/p>\n

The use of ChatGPT in this case might prompt tech doomerism fears. Yet focusing on concerns about generative AI as a potentially all-powerful force ultimately serves Silicon Valley interests. Both concerns about AI safety and dreams of AI power fuel companies like OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, with millions<\/a> of dollars going into researching AI as an allegedly existential risk to humanity. As critics like Edward Ongweso Jr. have pointed out<\/a>, such narratives look, either fearfully or hopefully, to a future of AI almighty, while overlooking the way current AI tools, although regularly shoddy and inaccurate, are already hurting workers and aiding harmful state functions.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom management devaluing labor to reactionaries censoring books \u2018AI\u2019 doesn’t have to be intelligent, work, or even exist,\u201d wrote<\/a> Patrick Blanchfield of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on Twitter. \u201cIts real function is just to mystify \/ automate \/ justify what the powerful were always doing and always going to do anyways.\u201d<\/p>\n

To underline Blanchfield\u2019s point, the ChatGPT book selection process was found to be unreliable and inconsistent when repeated<\/a> by Popular Science. \u201cA repeat inquiry regarding \u2018The Kite Runner,\u2019 for example, gives contradictory answers,\u201d the Popular Science reporters noted. \u201cIn one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini\u2019s novel to contain \u2018little to no explicit sexual content.\u2019 Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book \u2018does contain a description of a sexual assault.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet accuracy and reliability were not the point here, any more than \u201cprotecting\u201d children is the point of Republican book bans. The myth of AI efficiency and neutrality, like the lie of protecting children, simply offers, as the assistant superintendent herself put it, a \u201cdefensible process\u201d for fascist creep.<\/p>\n

The post AI Isn\u2019t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are.<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Overstating the power of algorithmic systems only serves to benefit the tech companies behind them.<\/p>\n

The post AI Isn\u2019t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are.<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6145,14,369],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182649"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1182649"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1190104,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182649\/revisions\/1190104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1182649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1182649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1182649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}