1y ago

AI Isn’t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are.

theintercept.com AI Isn’t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are.

Overstating the power of algorithmic systems only serves to benefit the tech companies behind them.

Excerpt:

To underline Blanchfield’s point, the ChatGPT book selection process was found to be unreliable and inconsistent when repeated by Popular Science. “A repeat inquiry regarding ‘The Kite Runner,’ for example, gives contradictory answers,” the Popular Science reporters noted. “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.’”

15 comments

When will people learn that LLMs have no understanding of truth or facts? They just generate something that looks like it was written by a human with some amount of internal consistency while making baseless assumptions for anything that doesn’t show up (enough) in their training set.
That makes them great for writing fiction but try asking ChatGPT for the best restaurants in a small town. It will gladly and without hesitation list you ten restaurants that have never existed, including links to websites that may belong to a completely different restaurant.

The point isn't that they used ChatGPT to pick books to ban. They may not have even used ChatGPT, they just said they did so they can point to a service and say "See? It wasn't us, it was that!"
They've shown time and again that they lie. That they do not act or argue in good faith. That they make excuses to distract people from what they're doing.
Stop treating these assholes as if debating them will do a damned thing. We're playing checkers, but they're fighting an MMA match.
- This is as transparent as hell. It reminds me of a TV show where a bunch of idiots plot to murder someone so they decide that if they all pull the trigger together, none of them are "technically" the murderer. Of course, that just meant they were all culpable.
  It's only a few layers of abstraction above "we didn't ban these books, we flipped a coin to decide whether to ban them and fate chose tails..."
  Pathetic.
- Lots of uses of "AI" are so people can deny responsibility. They feed in their history of discrimination, tell the machine to replicate it, then go, "it can't be discriminatory, it's an AI"

Fascists ban books, full stop.

This headline is garbage. Not only is it stating something that I haven't heard anyone seriously argue, it has nothing to do with the rest of the article, which just goes on to talk about how shitty a job ChatGPT is doing at the task.
- There was literally an article either yesterday or the day before with the headline "AI being used to ban books in Iowa" or something to that effect.
  
  Republicans are using AI to ban books is very different than saying AI is banning books. Nobody is saying "AI is banning books"

As a non American I absolutely do not care. How do I make content like this not show up on my feed without unsubscribing to Tech Beehaw?
- Don't get too comfortable. This nonsense is coming soon to a government near you.
- I mean I’m American and I’ve been looking for a technology community that actually posts cool and fun tech stories instead of apparently assuming every bit of tech is the anti-Christ incognito.
  If anyone happens to find one let me know, because I feel like the only people that care enough to post here, care in the wrong direction and fucking hate all things technology.

15 comments