An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban | Hacker News Reader

An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban

arstechnica.com

24 pointsCharlesW40 comments

Well this is a dark fucking timeline. No surprise the source. Expect the shocked pikachu faces and claims of being oppressed when these people get their beloved bible banned for being obscene using their own metrics.

No book is being "banned" here. Here's a list of the books that are allegedly "banned", linked in the article[1]. They're all widely available. You know a book has been "banned" when its price goes to $3000+ and you have to buy it online using a pseudonym or on the darkweb. If a school makes a choice about which books to include in a library or a curriculum, that is their choice (or their loss, I suppose).

Insofar as this relates to ChatGPT, it seems to be behaving as designed and answering the questions the administrators are asking it.

[1]https://www.thegazette.com/k/19-books-pulled-from-mason-city...

Everyone knows exactly what the title means, and it's a perfectly reasonable use of the English language.

"School district bans book" obviously has an implied "(from schools)" afterwards.

"Remove" would be a more appropriate verb, because the actual implication is that the books in question are "removed" from either the school library or a curriculum (or both). Are there restrictions on, say, carrying the text around in your book bag on school property? On having a digital copy on your device? No?

Then it's not a ban.

Ban means to remove and not let back in.

I don't suppose their school library would accept the charitable donations of the books they just removed.

Probably not, but that's still not a ban, it's an controlled inventory list. You can carry those charitable donations around on your person to your heart's content.

For now

Put down The Handmaid's Tale.

Controlled inventory list is just a name for the tool for keeping track of what's banned.

And it's not a donation if you aren't allowed to donate and have to keep it to carry around.

No, librarians curate their collections, they do not indiscriminately cram the shelves full of anything anyone gives them. Take a look at the processing of donations; most books are discarded, especially today when books are deprecated.

Libraries withdrawing books aren't banning them. If a school had banned a book, then the students would be prohibited from reading it. A student can read whatever he/she wants during free time, at home, whatever. I would imagine that if a teacher assigned a "free choice" book report that a student could even report on a so-called banned book.

The point of withdrawing books from schools and libraries is because they do not fit in the curriculum. Library shelves and curricula have finite space for materials. You can only teach N books per year, and so your school's curriculum decides which N books that's going to be, year over year.

The point of using the word "ban" in headlines is because it is sensationalistic and it angers people and makes them click on that headline and react with outrage that anyone would be exercising such reprehensible censorship. By using the word "ban" they take the focus away from the action or the content of the book and place it on perceived injustice. Even if I disagree with that book's contents, I can be outraged! How do we even know the content and theme of that book, because we didn't even read it!

To read all these headlines coming out, you would think that we are living in Fahrenheit 451 and that firemen are coming out to torch a big "bonfire of the vanities" style of deprecated textbooks and shitty novels. It's hilarious.

You're being downvoted but your analysis is correct. In this case, the article is meant to combine two clickbait antagonists ("book bans" and "ChatGPT"). Like you mention, there's a finite amount of both physical space and time for "books" in a library and curriculum. I'm not sure if people are imagining that both of these things are infinite, but decisions will eventually have to be made about what to include or not. "Book bans" is a good sorting phrase, because people like to imagine (as some sort of LARP) that their political enemies are the Nazis from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, marching around in a circle lighting otherwise reasonable things on fire. Doing this makes it easier to bully people in the middle to agreeing with you, and less easy to actually take a dispassionate approach to analysis of the situation.

> If a school makes a choice about which books to include in a library or a curriculum, that is their choice (or their loss, I suppose).

It's not the school's choice, there is a law that requires the school to do this.

These laws are written to further polarise society and gain some votes. Unfortunately it works...

Okay. If people vote for this, what's the problem?

The stupidity of it? Of people vote for brexit or nazis or slavery is it fine just because they voted?

>brexit

They influenced voters! Those bastards!

Yes, with lies.

Look up "We send the EU £350m a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead" as one of the major examples.

All lies are lies, but some lies are more lie-y than others.

Surely you can see the difference between voting for a set of books to be/not to be in a school curriculum/library (through your elected representation) and Nazis ... right?

Nazis had to start somewhere.

Yes, I see the difference between different flavors of stupidity.

But I percieve human stupidity as a fifth elemental force. And disasters caused by it as sort of natural disasters.

And while I can see the obvious difference between flames consuming someone's house and a peacefully burning candle, I am aware of the connection between them and I can make up a scenario of how one can potentially lead to the other.

>I can make up a scenario

Thanks, I'm aware that, in situations related to school curricula, most people need to make up absurd strawmen in order to argue that something is happening that isn't (e.g. removing pornography from the school library inevitably leads to book burnings in the parking lot after the high school football game). In your example you'd be the one in favor of banning candles because you fundamentally don't trust people to handle things themselves in a reasonable way, according to their own interests and preferences.

I don't need to make up any scenarios of slippery slope. Book banning is by itself wrong in any shape or form. It's a manifestation of the same flavor of stupidity that makes people succumb to authocratic and theocratic ideas.

Exactly. And as we've established, no book is being banned here.

The only thing we established is that you ascribe way more meaning than necessary to the word ban when it's next to a word book. Which makes you opposed to using it to describe what occured.

People voted for the Nazis too well knowing what they stood for.

The gas chambers were legal. What’s your point?

>People voted for the Nazis too well knowing what they stood for.

This is actually a lie that the Nazi party propagandized after Hitler seized the Chancellorship.

If people vote to boil kittens alive that doesn't make it okay. Don't make us spoon-feed you, you're acting in bad faith and you know it.

This case is about controls on school library inventory and class curriculum. I don't understand what boiling kittens has to do with this, other than it being a very weird strawman. Removing books that contain content some find objectionable is the same as boiling kittens? Is that what you're saying?

Everyone here knows what you're doing, it is extremely transparent. I'm telling you to stop it. You're not as clever as you think you are.

>I'm telling you to stop it.

Oh well in that case.

You brought up a ridiculous comparison (boiling kittens) in order to attempt to bully me into agreeing with your position that, for some reason, elected officials restricting library inventories and school curricula is "bad", ostensibly because you have different content preferences than the people involved (in Iowa, in this case).

Perhaps you should stop it.

Weird. A few of these were mandatory reading when I was in school

The ChatGPT part seems like a decoy, the issue might instead be the processes of compiling the master lists. Who decides which books should, and should not, be assessed? By which standards? Seems like a lot of leeway for arbitrary decisions.

I shall now use a book to decide which LLMs to ban

TAOCP 0b10:48h:0x07

Thoust shallnt use negative prompts if thoust can use clevering of positive ones. Thy only exception is when llamas appearest without having been asked first thusly. And Joseph spake against the infidels, it was good, and the build was green. Exit code 0. Amen.

Intellectual curiosity in the spirt of classic liberalism is fading with the perpetually shifting sands of ephemeral, amnesic, digital pseudo-knowledge and mirror image closed-minded orthodoxy of each side in the culture wars.

Ginsberg and Nabokov will disappear from America since the religious right is hell-bent on banning anything remotely controversial, the new left is now banning whatever they don't agree with, and most students' parents are too busy and uninvolved to push back against moral panics, ignorance, or indolence. The end result is like the fun level of modern kids' parks: so "safe" they're absolutely boring.

The false "both sides are the same!" narrative is not productive or accurate.

I really don’t see the difference here. Both sides are true believers advancing their vision of How Things Should Be.

Yes, that’s how politics has always been and always will be. People get into politics to advance their vision for making things better. The question is how those visions differ.

If the difference still isn’t clear, keep in mind there is only one party that consistently opposes giving food to hungry children.

I find this is a fairly typical comment. Though it acknowledges that there are differences of opinion and belief, it then tries to sidestep the philosophical quandary by simply claiming victory by default. (“My side is the only one that could have any legitimacy - see?”)

Think critically. Think of a couple of possible reasons why that might not be true

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