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.
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It has intelligence right there in the name, it has to be smart.
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 teethEzekiel 23:20
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Imagine banning books, at all. Sure doesn’t sound horrificly authoritarian to me /s
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.
Next time, GPT3 will be used to submit book takedown requests, and also to review them.
“Idiocracy” was not supposed to be a manual!
It’s not a manual, it’s a prediction… what’s messed up, is how much of it is coming true.
I think the bigger problem here isn’t the use of LLMs to teach children, but the fact that LLMs are being used as a weapons now in the polarization of American politics. LLMs are helping political extremists push their ideology into the real world, eliminating critical thinking in the process.
The thing about technology in USian politics is, it tends to only be picked up if it can be weaponized. Otherwise it tends to go unnoticed.
How are LLMs helping that happen and eliminating critical thinking?
Wait until they ban farenheit 451.
I had the audacity to feel a bit bored by that book when I had to read it in school. I never once thought we’d end up here.
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.”
On the one hand, the possibility that ChatGPT will hallucinate that an appropriate book is inappropriate is a big problem. But on the other hand, making high-profile mistakes like this keeps the practice in the news and keeps showing how bad it is to ban books, so maybe it has a silver lining.
“Hallucinate” seems like an odd vocabulary choice when talking about an AI. It implies much more sentience than an AI can possibly have, plus the ability to spontaneously create from whole-cloth. (Which AI can’t do, at all.)
I feel like our brave new culture needs a different word for the non-sensical/inaccurate products of AI; something with the flavors of “assemble” “fabricate” “construct” “collate” “collage” “grab-bag”.
Our vocabulary isn’t keeping up with technology. Is there a linguist in the house? We need more words!
Might as well ask God out loud about each one and assume He always says “Yes.”
Gotta ban something (/s)
Good bye catcher in the rye
Why does it even matter if there are books that aren’t in the school library? It’s not like there’s no way a student could read a certain book just because it’s not inside the school. This is as pointless as arguing about which restrooms people can use. People on both sides get all worked up and upset, but at the end of the day a student can read a book even if it’s not in the school and anyone can use any restroom. My mom used to go in the men’s room all the time and nobody ever took any issue with it. I’ve read tons of books that weren’t in my school library. In fact, almost every book I’ve ever read wasn’t in my school library.
This is a very short sighted view of the situation at hand.
The banning of books and literal re-writing of history in certain states should be concerning for anyone who realizes what a dark road we’re headed down.
it’s like watching the rise of the third reich in real time.
Literally
It’s not about protecting the children nor has it ever been
The books aren’t “banned”. They’re just not in the school. These arguments are meant to distract from the real issues of concern that are going on. But, like I said, it doesn’t matter, so I’m not going to argue about it.
That depends on how much access kids have to a different library, and I’d argue that traditionalist moral censorship is not going to stop there.
Hey guess what. Your experience doesn’t represent everyone’s experience.
[I was privileged enough to have easy access to any book I wanted without needing to rely on the school library so it won’t be a problem for people like me. It only prevents poor students and students with controlling parents from obtaining the books excluded from the school library so I don’t care.]
[Also, the literal laws making it a crime for people to use the bathroom they are comfortable with have never impacted me so I don’t care about that either.]
[Why are we wasting time and energy on issues that don’t impact me personally?]
An impressive level of narcissism.
