Mason City Iowa's school district is scrambling to ensure its library collection is ideologically pure enough for the state's new content restrictions ahead of the new school year and has turned to AI for help..
Interestingly, there's a bit more going on in this story than the above article.
Upon asking ChatGPT, “Do any of the following books or book series contain explicit or sexual scenes?” OpenAI’s program offered PopSci a different content analysis than what Mason City administrators received. Of the 19 removed titles, ChatGPT told PopSci that only four contained “Explicit or Sexual Content.” Another six supposedly contain “Mature Themes but not Necessary Explicit Content.” The remaining nine were deemed to include “Primarily Mature Themes, Little to No Explicit Sexual Content.”
Regardless of whether or not any of the titles do or do not contain said content, ChatGPT’s varying responses highlight troubling deficiencies of accuracy, analysis, and consistency. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini’s novel to contain “little to no explicit sexual content.” Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book “does contain a description of a sexual assault.”
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