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.’
ChatGPT is famous for hallucinating answers to factual questions. And they used it anyway? Day by day, the risk of AI killing us all is paling in comparison to the risk of stupid humans killing us all using AI.
ChatGPT makes us go. We are smart.
ChatGPT is famous for hallucinating answers to factual questions. And they used it anyway?
Sure, why not? Did you think actually censoring the appropriate content and nothing else was the goal? The spokesperson says as much - they don’t have the time or interest to actually implement the law, but have to - so they went with a sophisticated-sounding but actually ineffective solution. This is working exactly as intended.
As for the lawmakers, they don’t care what kids read, really, and they can be pretty sure their base won’t hear about this through the ideologically-friendly media sources they use. It’s not new logic, Mussolini’s trains were late sometimes and Hitler’s economy was propped up by tooth gold, too.
Day by day, the risk of AI killing us all is paling in comparison to the risk of stupid humans killing us all using AI.
What about stupid humans making an AI that kills us all? 👉😎👉
Like, it bugs me that there’s a slap fight over how directly we’ll fuck ourselves up with AI. Imagine if doctors had spent the pandemic publicly arguing over long covid risks vs. ICU deaths.
I asked ChatGPT the same about the bible. It said yes.
Song of Solomon 7:7-9
Your stature is like a palm tree,
and your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree
and lay hold of its fruit.
Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
and the scent of your breath like apples,
and your mouth like the best wine.She
It goes down smoothly for my beloved,
gliding over lips and teeth
Okay, the thing that really matters to me:
“Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” Exman tells PopSci via email. “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.”
According to Exman, she and fellow administrators first compiled a master list of commonly challenged books, then removed all those challenged for reasons other than sexual content. For those titles within Mason City’s library collections, administrators asked ChatGPT the specific language of Iowa’s new law, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?”
It really only got rid of things that would’ve otherwise had to go to begin with, while saving a few others.
It feels a bit closer to malicious compliance more than truly letting the AI decide the fate of things, and doing full proper compliance within the 3 months they were given would’ve been nigh impossible. I’m suspecting that the lawmakers were hoping that by giving them such a small timeframe, schools would throw everything vaguely suspect out. This ultimately leaves more books accessible, which I consider to be a good end result, even if the process to get there is a little weird.
Imagine banning books, at all. Sure doesn’t sound horrificly authoritarian to me /s
“Idiocracy” was not supposed to be a manual!
