An Iowa school district is using AI to ban books

📆 8/14/2023 8:29 PM
📰 engadget

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Mason City Iowa's school district is scrambling to ensure its library collection is ideologically pure enough for the state's new content restrictions ahead of the new school year and has turned to AI for help..

has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district's libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year.

In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Governor Kim Reynolds subsequently signed,, which enacted sweeping changes to the state's education curriculum.

As such, the Mason City School District is bringing in AI to parse suspect texts for banned ideas and descriptions since there are simply too many titles for human reviewers to cover on their own. Per the district, a"master list" is first cobbled together from"several sources" based on whether there were previous complaints of sexual content.

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Iowa School District Bans Books by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood After AI Review for 'Depictions of a Sex Act'Nineteen book titles — including 'Handmaid's Tale,' 'Beloved' and 'The Kite Runner' — have been pulled from school libraries in Mason City, Iowa after AI technology flagged them for 'depictions of a sex act.'
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