Right-wingers are letting AI do their homework on book bans: report

It’s not enough that the right-wing is still working overtime to ban books, say critics. It’s that they’re letting someone else do their homework.

“Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries,” reports 404 Media. “Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.”

Conservative book-rating sites like BLOCKADE (Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism), for example, rely on xAI or OpenAI API keys to generate book reports from PDF/ePUB files, says 404 Media. It essentially bases an analysis on a set of parameters that are publicly available through the creator’s Github page.

But AI is no Roger Ebert. It’s not even a critic. It’s just a list haunted by a chatbot, reports 404 Media.

“The program’s script includes a list of roughly 300 words, each assigned a severity score that contributes to an overall appropriateness score based on their own metrics,” said 404 Media. “The script explicitly defines ‘educational inappropriateness’ as ‘content offensive to conservative values,’ while also asking the AI ‘not to include any additional text or explanation’ for its decisions.’”

Jeremy Blackburn, associate professor of computer science and director of the Institute for AI and Society at Binghamton University, tells 404 Media that it is the kind of cheating that would get you drummed out of college.

“If you want to classify content in this kind of context, maybe toxicity with offensive content, troublesome content — whoever it is it finds troublesome — asking for an explanation is super useful,” said Blackburn, who did not hide his disdain for the right’s decision to leave analysis to a chatbot. “There’s just a lot of responsibility being abdicated if you’re abdicating the responsibility with this kind of not sophisticated prompting strategy with no real thought into how to evaluate what comes out of these models.”

It is the dumbest of dumb things used by cheaters to censor others, say intellectual freedom advocates. BLOCKADE interprets conservative values to mean whatever xAI or OpenAI’s LLMs say they mean and then builds a “risk profile” for the book that the right-winger then saves as a PDF to ape legitimate book reviews from organizations like Moms for Liberty. These bot reviews are designed to be submitted as attachments to formal book challenges to school and library districts.

404 Media says other conservative organizations then mass produce the bans “using heat maps to monitor books they don’t like that remain available in school libraries by aggregating data by state, district, school building and the number of books in circulation.”

“Committees are basing their decisions off of that biased information, and so they’re going to be more predisposed to remove books because the only thing they’re seeing is a red flag saying, ‘Hey, this book is p----, you should remove this book,” said Jessica Horton, who oversees Let Davis Read — a watchdog group monitoring local book challenges submitted to her children’s school district.