The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

[Claire Woodcock at 404 Media]

This AI-powered effort is intentionally designed to create chilling effects and reduce support for vulnerable communities:

“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. 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.”

According to 404 Media’s reporting, the script has a list of 300 or so words that form the basis of a heuristic that applies an “appropriateness” score to each one. If the book is deemed inappropriate, the script creates an automated report designed to be attached to book challenges at the school district level.

This reminds me of DOGE itself, which used a keyword-based system to flag “woke” grants that should be defunded that led to some incredibly dumb decisions about what should go:

“Among them, for example, was a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best we can tell, the project ran into trouble with Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team.”

These techniques are clearly inaccurate, but that’s not the point: it’s enough to cause havoc and make people second guess publishing books on certain topics. It’s the same culture of chaos that led to a school librarian being fired for (correctly) refusing to remove over a hundred LGBTQ books from the children’s to the adult section of her library. And it’s all designed to harm some of the people who need the most support.

[Link]