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ChatGPT can help find the racy passages in popular fiction

Bridgette Exman, an assistant superintendent in Mason City, Iowa, describes how she tried to comply with her state's new law banning books in schoolrooms that contain “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act”:

We created a list from several lists of commonly challenged books, then deleted from our list any book challenged for reasons other than sexual content. We then further winnowed our list to books in our school library collections.

That’s when we turned to ChatGPT for help. For each of these titles, we asked: Does the book contain a description of a sex act? ChatGPT identified 19 books, though for each, its response contained a caveat: “Yes, but,” noting a scene’s literary value or contextual appropriateness.

That sounds very clever to me! Oddly, not everyone thought so, even though Exman and her fellow humans read through all the books flagged by ChatGPT to make sure they really did contain sex acts.

In other words, it's not as if AI was busily censoring books here. It was the Iowa legislature that did it, and Exman was legally required to comply. Given that, what's wrong with a bit of labor-saving help for an onerous job she never wanted to do in the first place?

Needless to say, people were also upset about the particular books that were removed. One of them was Toni Morrison's Beloved, undoubtedly for this passage:

All forty-six men woke to rifle shot....When all forty-six were standing in a line in the trench, another rifle shot signaled the climb out and up to the ground above, where one thousand feet of the best hand-forged chain in Georgia stretched. Each man bent and waited.

....Kneeling in the mist they waited for the whim of a guard, or two, or three. Or maybe all of them wanted it. Wanted it from one prisoner in particular or none—or all.

"Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hungry, nigger?"

"Yes, sir."

"Here you go."

Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus.

Is this appropriate for school kids? That's a matter of opinion. Personally I think it's fine. But then, we could buy subscriptions to Hustler for every five-year-old in America and I'd be OK with it. Obviously my opinion is not a widely held one. But regardless of how you feel about it, how bad is it that in a gray area like this Iowa has one opinion while, say, California has a different one?

I suppose this makes me a bad liberal, but I can't get too worked up about all this. It's not as if Beloved is banned from the entire state of Iowa, after all. It's just considered inappropriate for Iowa school libraries. Maybe that's out of touch with modern mores, but it's hardly the end of civilization.

23 thoughts on “ChatGPT can help find the racy passages in popular fiction

  1. The Big Texan

    I usually like KD, but this is a dumb take. Book banners won't stop with one book in one library just like abortion banners won't stop with reversing Roe. Your apathy allows the fascists to win.

    1. kahner

      yeah, it's very strange to me that kevin refuses to see this in the very obvious larger context of a political party run amok with (sorry, kevin) fascistic tendencies, stripping rights from citizens and corrupting the democratic process. book banning is just a play in that playbook, not the whole game.

  2. different_name

    I mean, in a world where there really was an option of this - that the range of censorship stopped at Beloved in Iowa - perhaps that would be something people could live with.

    But I think Kevin is as aware as everyone else here that nuanced compromise is not exactly considered a public virtue in the US, at least when it comes to culture wars the right pushes. We just got done watching a big part of the ratchet strategy in play with abortion, much the way it happened with the 2nd Amendment a couple decades back.

    We know how this game is played. I have no idea why Kevin thinks preemptive compromise here will somehow satisfy the sort of bigot that joins Moms For Liberty rather than encouraging them to move on to their next target, like they've done every. other. time.

    1. James B. Shearer

      "... that the range of censorship stopped at Beloved in Iowa ..."

      It extends to Huckleberry Finn in other places. Most public school libraries will try to avoid books that many parents think are objectionable.

  3. Anandakos

    Depending on the grade, this will pass right over most "schoolkids". What schoolkid knows the term "foreskin"? It's "the tip", and "I promise I won't put more in that that!"

    1. Austin

      Considering that in some states more than half of boys are no longer circumcised mainly because Medicaid and private insurance balk at paying for it, I’m pretty sure lots of kids know what a foreskin is. 30 years ago it was in my sex ed classes - pull back your foreskin if you have one before putting on the condom - and general health classes - be sure to clean underneath the foreskin if you have one.

  4. Art Eclectic

    Conservatives are worried about books like they've never seen the internet. Good luck monitoring that, your kids already know how to evade every single parental control.

    1. Austin

      It is amusing that here in VA, they banned online porn if the site doesn’t check ID first… but only if the device you’re accessing it from is stationary (i.e. internet through your cable or landline provider). But that device that you hold in one hand while using your other hand for other activities? That’s all cool: porn can be freely accessed through cell data plans without checking ID. Stupid old and/or prudish legislators.

  5. ucgoldenbears

    The issue isn’t the particular book (many of them are ridiculous), it’s the process.

    The state is opening up cases where a librarian, in good faith judgement of providing education to their student, is subject to job discipline or even criminal charges based on vague criteria. Librarians have to spend their time, energy, and budget to make sure there are zero books that can be challenged by bad faith troll community members rather than teaching children.

    The politicians need to let their professionals do their job and not have them running around to mollify trolls disguised as concerned adults.

    1. KenSchulz

      Exactly. The problem is not, ‘California and Iowa having differing opinions’, it is state legislators making decisions that should be left to school boards, even individual librarians and teachers. It is the politicization of everything. It is of a piece with the efforts by politicians to curtail the regulatory authority of public-health officers. It’s anti-science, anti-expertise, anti-professionalism. It should be opposed on principle, even if the cases seem tolerable, the motives are not.

  6. D_Ohrk_E1

    That sounds very clever to me! Oddly, not everyone thought so, even though Exman and her fellow humans read through all the books flagged by ChatGPT to make sure they really did contain sex acts.

    That's the setup for the lawyer who ended up relying on ChatGPT to write his brief, resulting in the citation of a fake precedent, ending with a court's sanctions.

    If errors are inconsequential, using ChatGPT is perfectly fine. If, however, a single error is consequential, you would be wise to not use it in that situation. It is not a matter of when that error will happen, it's just a matter of when you don't bother to check.

  7. pjcamp1905

    When I was in high school, Alexander Solzhenitsyn became a Thing. My English teacher wanted to read something so he chose One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich because it was a manageable size. It went along swimmingly but unbeknownst to us, a Concerned Mother was reading it too. The whole exercise came to a screeching halt mid-book when the Concerned Mother discovered a single word: damn.

    Forgive me if I think that anyone in the business of banning books is a Concerned Asshole. There are no circumstances under which that is in any way admirable or acceptable, not even in Iowa.

    Concerned Mother had it half right. Read along with your child, and if you see something problematic, help your child understand it. But she had no business imposing her concerns on everyone else's child. Neither does the Iowa legislature.

  8. Austin

    I still have no idea why educated people are fleeing the reddest 40 or so states… the people in those states seem so nice.

  9. skeptonomist

    The problem in some states is that censorship is not up to robots or librarians, it's left up to any nutjob who finds something wrong with any books for any (right-wing) reason. The Republican politicians avoid the onus of censorship for themselves - they say it's up to "the people". And local Republican organizations - often with astroturf backing - are encouraged to take over school boards.

    The goal is not reasonable censorship of "obscene" material- there have been no real problems with that type of thing. The impetus is probably mainly from purging anti-racism, which has been getting more forceful.

  10. royko

    On ChatGPT, yeah, I don't really see a problem using it in this way, other than to say given the current state of the technology, you have to have a human review passages/works it flags because it's not 100% reliable. But the debate over whether books should be removed from school (or public) libraries is really unrelated to the AI.

    On the other hand, "But then, we could buy subscriptions to Hustler for every five-year-old in America and I'd be OK with it."

    Is this remotely true, or hyperbole? I'm a pretty staunch defender of free speech and access to even deeply controversial books, and even I think this would be extremely inappropriate and unhealthy for a 5 year old. By the time my kids reach high school, I can't imagine censoring their reading materials, but when kids are younger, there are things that they're just not ready for. (And in most cases, they are aware and will tell you.) And even by porn magazine standards, Hustler is crudely explicit.

    "I suppose this makes me a bad liberal, but I can't get too worked up about all this."

    I've noticed there are a lot of things you don't get worked up about. Florida trying to distort depictions of slavery is no big deal as long as they use real facts in the effort to do it. Who cares if they ban books with explicit scenes from school libraries, after all they're available elsewhere! And charges that teachers are "groomers"? Oh, that's been going on for ages, right? And all these abortion restrictions, can't we just ship these women to blue states for their abortions? Nice, easy solution.

    I invite to come down to some of our local school board meetings where this is one front in a much larger fight. Sure, there is a reasonable debate to be had about what's appropriate for schools. While I don't really think it serves anyone to make this a state-level rather than local issue, I do think it's something communities should decide. But there is a very concerted and well funded movement against our school boards, education systems and educators, public libraries, and local officials. This is the next front in the conservative gameplan: like talk radio in the 80s, Fox News in the 90s, state legislatures in the 2000s, this is where they're attacking under the radar.

    They're looking for anything they can hype up into a moral panic, often lying about the facts. In our community, most of the books objected to aren't even being checked out. We're lucky when kids take any interest in their school libraries. It's just another thing to whip up fear about. Just like "grooming". And if they get books banned from public schools, they'll take over public libraries and ban them there. And sure, they'll be available somewhere, we're in a digital age. But they'll continue to stigmatize sex and any discussion of issues challenging our teens and any deep look into the problems from our history. They'll hound abortion providers and abortion patients and harass them with crazy, unconstitutional laws. They'll try to make LGBTQ+ synonymous with pedophile.

    It's not your garden variety conservative doing this. These people are on the fringes. But they have the backing of conservative groups and are exploiting the conservative fears that Fox has been planting for decades now. So these people who are quite dangerous are receiving a lot of support. I hope they peter out. But to just ignore that and shrug off their flashpoints is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst.

    That doesn't mean every book is appropriate at every school or for every child. It doesn't mean that we can't listen to conservatives' concerns about education or our communities. But you can't ignore the rabid Elephant in the room.

  11. Ogemaniac

    That passage is more graphic but less depraved that Judges 19-21. Both involve homosexual rape and murder, but Judges also includes kidnapping, sex trafficking, genocide and mass rape by the “good” guys.

    Ban the Bible it is!

  12. Rattus Norvegicus

    Considering that when I was in school Beloved was taught in Junior or Senior year of high school, it is completely appropriate. Same for The Bluest Eye, another popular Morisson target.

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