Illustration: The Verge
Iowa’s Mason City Community School District is pulling 19 books from school libraries that administrators found to contain “a description or depiction of a sex act” in order to comply with Republican-backed state laws. A key arbiter of whether the books should be banned: ChatGPT.
The news that the district had used AI software in its decisions was first reported by the Mason City Globe Gazette last week, but it wasn’t clear what tool was used — or how exactly officials went about doing it — until Popular Science reported that ChatGPT was used. The banned books include The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.
According to Popular Science’s reporting,…
