<
https://www.404media.co/blockade-the-right-is-using-ai-content-scanners-to-try-to-supercharge-book-banning/>
"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.
One such experiment indicates a desire to accelerate content production of book
reviews for conservative book-rating sites. BLOCKADE, which stands for
“Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism,”
relies on xAI or OpenAI API keys to generate book reports from PDF/ePUB files,
basing the analysis on a set of parameters that are publicly available through
the creator’s Github page.
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. 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.
“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,” Jeremy Blackburn,
associate professor of computer science and director of the Institute for AI
and Society at Binghamton University, told
404 Media.
Blackburn notes that there’s a lot of control relinquished to a chatbot as to
what the definition of pornography or conservative values is. The definition is
whatever the AI model has defined it as.
“There’s just a lot of responsibility being abdicated,” he added. “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.”
Intellectual freedom advocates are alarmed by the frequency in which censors
rely on AI to help them determine what books to remove from public spaces. When
BLOCKADE is finished interpreting conservative values to mean whatever xAI or
OpenAI’s LLMs say they mean, it builds a risk profile for the book that the
user can then export as a PDF that looks a lot like the book reviews
organizations like Moms for Liberty popularized before AI chatbots were on the
market. The format has inspired numerous copycats from organizations that take
the idea a step further, 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. In other instances,
activists use social media channels to highlight their experiments with using
AI chatbots to challenge passages for possible violations of state laws."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
